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Modernism in Mainstream
Magazines, 1920-37
Charlie Dawkins
Merton College
DPhil Thesis, Trinity Term 2015
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Abstract
This thesis studies five mainstream British weekly magazines: Time and Tide, the Nation and
Athenaeum, the Spectator, the Listener, and the New Statesman. It explores how these magazines
reviewed, discussed and analysed modernist literature over an eighteen-year span, 1920-37.
Over this period, and in these magazines, the concept of modernism developed. Drawing on
work by philosopher Ian Hacking, this research traces how the idea of modernism emerged into
the public realm. It focuses largely on the book reviews printed in these magazines, texts that
played an important and underappreciated role in negotiations between modernist texts and
the audience of these magazines.
Chapter 1, on Time and Tide, covers a period from the magazine’s inception in 1920 to 1926,
and draws particularly on Catherine Clay’s work on this magazine. It discusses the genre of
‘weekly review’ that this new magazine attempted to join, and the cultural place of modernism
in the early 1920s. Chapter 2, on the Nation and Athenaeum, covers Leonard Woolf’s literary
editorship (1923-30), under the ownership of J. M. Keynes, and makes use of Keynes’s archive
at King’s College, Cambridge, and Woolf’s at the University of Sussex. Chapter 3, on the
Spectator, covers Evelyn Wrench’s editorship (1925-32), and explores the relationship between
this magazine, ideologies of conservatism, and modernism. Chapter 4, on the Listener, focuses
on the magazine’s publication of new poetry, including an extraordinary 1933 supplement that
printed W. H. Auden’s ‘The Witnesses’. This work revolves around Janet Adam Smith, literary
editor in these years, and draws on Smith’s archive at the National Library of Scotland as well
as the BBC archives at Caversham. Chapter 5, on the New Statesman in the 1930s under new
editor Kingsley Martin, explores a period when modernism was more widely recognized, and
pays particular attention to a short text by James Joyce printed in 1932, ‘From a Banned Writer
to a Banned Singer’.
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Acknowledgements
The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) supported this research by the award of a
doctoral studentship. I am also grateful to Merton College, Oxford, and the English Faculty,
Oxford, for providing funding to visit archives in Edinburgh and Sussex.
I thank the staff at the following archival institutions for their invaluable help and support: the
BBC Written Archives Centre, Caversham; the National Library of Scotland; the Women’s
Library, London School of Economics; the British Library; the Archive Centre, King’s College,
Cambridge; Special Collections, the University of Sussex.
This project was improved immeasurably in discussion with colleagues at Merton College, the
Oxford English Faculty, and the British Association of Modernist Studies. I am grateful to them
all. However, I am utterly indebted to my supervisor, Michael Whitworth, for his unstinting
support and guidance, and above all for his genuine interest in my writing.
It is unlikely that this thesis would have been completed without the support of friends in
Oxford, London, and elsewhere. Without my family, it would never even have been started.
This thesis is dedicated to my father, Graham Dawkins (1960-2001).
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction: Making Up Modernism .......................................................................... 5!
1. Time and Tide, 1920-26 ............................................................................................. 42!
2. The Nation and Athenaeum, 1923-30 ............................................................................ 75!
3. The Spectator, 1925-32 ............................................................................................. 116!
4. The Listener, 1931-33 .............................................................................................. 150!
5. The New Statesman and Nation, 1931-37 .................................................................... 188!
Conclusion ................................................................................................................. 228!
Appendix A: Finances ............................................................................................... 234!
Appendix B: Circulations .......................................................................................... 236!
Appendix C: Front Pages .......................................................................................... 241!
Bibliography .............................................................................................................. 247!
INTRODUCTION: MAKING UP MODERNISM
This thesis explores how modernism emerged into mainstream literary culture in Britain.
It argues that a concept of modernism developed as modernist texts and ideas were
reviewed and discussed in the mainstream periodical press. In examining the reception of texts
now accepted as modernist, rather than searching only for moments where they found a
positive reception, I emphasize a need to attend to a range of critical responses to modernism,
from disdain and scepticism to cautious optimism.
Critical responses to modernism are, of course, not only found in the periodical press.
One might, for instance, turn to diaries (say, Virginia Woolf on Ulysses as a ‘mis-fire’), or letters
(Lytton Strachey on Jacob’s Room as a ‘most wonderful achievement’), or early critical
monographs (Edmund Wilson’s Axel’s Castle, perhaps).1 Even within the periodical press, one
would find modernism discussed across the full gamut of publications, from daily newspapers to
expensive, short-lived little magazines.
But in order to explore how the concept of modernism entered into mainstream literary
culture, this thesis focuses on a group of British periodicals most often described as the ‘weekly
reviews’. These have a principal focus on politics, and a typical price of sixpence. There are
chapters on each of five magazines: Time and Tide, the Nation and Athenaeum, the Spectator, the
Listener, and the New Statesman. In addition to the arguments made by this thesis, I hope that this
research might also turn scholarly attention to these weekly reviews, a group of periodicals that
offer rich yet largely unexplored ground for literary critics. Here, however, these five periodicals
offer case studies that together show how the idea of modernism emerged tentatively, complexly
and incompletely into mainstream British culture.
*
1 The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. by Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie, 5 vols (London: Hogarth Press, 1977-
1984), II, 199 (6 September 1922); The Letters of Lytton Strachey, ed. by Paul Levy (London: Penguin, 2006), p. 523 (to
Virginia Woolf, 9 October 1922); Edmund Wilson, Axel's Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1890-1930 (New
York: Scribner, 1931).
MAKING UP MODERNISM
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On 12 July 1933, the Listener’s regular editorial discussed the contentious question of
modernism. That week, the magazine had printed a supplement of nine poems, all previously
unpublished, including work by W. H. Auden, Herbert Read, and C. Day Lewis.2 The editorial
ran with the heading ‘“Modernist” Poetry’, and reflected on the poetry that the Listener had
been publishing since early 1931: a ‘new poem each week’. The poems had been ‘pretty widely
noticed’, though the reaction was varied. ‘Some have liked our choices, others have most
strongly disapproved.’ One reader is quoted at length.
‘A frequent blemish’ is the verdict of one correspondent, who goes on to accuse the poems as
‘extravagances’ that ‘may perhaps please certain inferior literary cliques who strain after novelty
for mere novelty’s sake’, to condemn the ‘modernist cult of ugliness, but it finds no favour with the
general public’, and to conclude ‘that there are certain fixed and agreed standards in poetic verse’
to which evidently the majority of our poets do not conform.3
It is difficult to know how to interpret this use of an anti-modernist reader. Should we see this
reader as a hidebound critic to be mocked, or a respected voice of scepticism to which the
periodical is apologising? The ambiguity is intensified by a long sentence in parentheses that
follows immediately after.
(Observe the use of the word ‘modernist’: if a convenient label had to be found for the 140 odd
poems we have published up to date ‘modern’ would probably do as well as any: but our critics
prefer to call them ‘modernist’—that word which as applied to architecture, sculpture, painting
and music as well as poetry, nearly always means quite simply something modern that the writer
doesn’t like, and carries with it a flavour of abuse.) (p. 50)
The Listener identifies ‘modernist’ as a term of ‘abuse’, and places it in quotation marks. Yet the
term is in the title, and the Listener continues to use it throughout—always in quotation marks.
Towards the end of the piece, it shifts briefly to speak of ‘modernism’, which also remains in
quotation marks.4 Here, the Listener takes a term of abuse and reclaims it. Negative reactions
and abuse can of course define something just as well as adulation.
2 This supplement is discussed in detail in Chapter 4.
3 [Janet Adam Smith], ‘“Modernist” Poetry’, The Listener, 12 July 1933, p. 50. This editorial is unsigned, and is
treated as such here. I attribute authorship to assistant editor Janet Adam Smith, as discussed in Chapter 4.
Further references to this editorial are given after quotations in the text.
4 ‘It would be absurd to pretend that every one [poem] that is attacked for its “modernism” will survive’ (p. 50). It
should be noted that the noun ‘modernism’ functions adjectivally in this unusual grammatical construction. While
it is still important that the Listener uses the noun as well as the adjective ‘modernist’, this particular use closely links
‘modernism’ to ‘every one [poem]’, and thus restricts the extent to which ‘modernism’ can refer to a wider
movement.
MAKING UP MODERNISM
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Crucially, however, this argument back against the sceptical reader is not entirely
unkind, mocking, or dismissive. An anti-modernist reaction is taken seriously, and engaged with.
There are, the magazine suggests, three main reasons for disliking modernist poetry.
In one sense, poetry is unlucky in its medium—the philistine ‘I don’t know much about art but I do
know what I like’ is seldom heard in relation to poetry. Obviously, many think, if you have eyes to
read Bradshaw you have eyes to read poetry: and so when they do come across a poem they are
aggrieved if it does not immediately please—blandly unconscious of the fact that a fine sensibility
to poetry is probably as uncommon a gift, and as hard an acquisition, as a fine sensibility to music
or painting. Secondly, as was noticed by Wordsworth, most people read a good deal of poetry
when young, seldom read it seriously again, and so are all too apt to judge the poetry they are
faced with at forty by the standards of what they wallowed in at seventeen. It is the old trick of
judging a thing by what it never intended to be. A. is condemned for bad rhymes—when A. is
deliberately practising the use of half-rhyme. B. does not scan—but B., if they would only look,
though he does not regularly hammer down his accents every second syllable, is using a metre
where one stress can carry a varying number of unaccented syllables. The third common cause of
antagonism to new poetry probably lies in an inadequate appreciation of the masters whose names
are being constantly invoked to confound the moderns. The anthology habit is greatly to blame for
this, a habit that invites the reader to regard poetry like chocolates, something that gives immediate
gratification with the minimum effort, and gets him out of the way of reading poets in bulk. (p. 50)
The Listener offers three counterarguments familiar to any student of modernism: modernist
poetry is difficult, and requires skill to be read properly; it must be judged on its own terms; it
has a complex relationship to literary history. These arguments had been made before, and
would be made again.
But if the rhetoric is familiar, the location and tone are important. The Listener was the
highest circulating of the magazines covered by this thesis: in 1933, its average weekly
circulation was 42,627 copies.5 Tonally, the piece replicates the ambiguity found in its
appropriation of ‘modernist’. On the one hand, the sceptical reader is ‘blandly unconscious’,
with ‘inadequate appreciation of the masters’. They have an ‘anthology habit’, and ‘regard
poetry like chocolates, something that gives immediate gratification with the minimum effort’
The unpleasant comparison of inadequate reading practices with unthinking, fattening
consumption had been made more famously by Q. D. Leavis in the previous year.6
On the other hand, this editorial directly addresses the sceptical reader, and values their
as-yet ungained approval.
5 See Appendix B.
6 Q. D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public (London: Chatto & Windus, 1932).
MAKING UP MODERNISM
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All this, we would ask our readers to believe, is no special pleading on behalf of the poems we have
published. It would be absurd to pretend that every one that is attacked for its ‘modernism’ will
survive like Wordsworth’s to confound its critics in a century’s time. But it is a plea for open and
unprejudiced and informed reading of poetry—reading that will take into account what the poet is
trying to do, that will contribute its fair share of effort and intelligence, that will commend or
condemn a poem not because it is traditional, not because it is modern, but because it is good or
bad in its own kind. (p. 50)
Significantly, that approval is sought for on the basis of an appeal to history, and the canon.
Anti-modernist critics are compared to those who jeered at Wordsworth and Keats. The
Listener’s conclusion is that ‘much of the writing which now seems wildly remote from tradition
will be seen to have been only unconventional in surface effects, that though it is not like what
was most admired in 1860, or in 1910, it has its own distinctive title to the name of poetry’ (p.
50). Reading modernist poetry as legitimate, canonical literature is thus not a case of aesthetic
fashion, so much as a chance for wisdom in hindsight.
This editorial is extraordinary, and is certainly one of the stronger voices for modernism
discussed by this thesis. I discuss it here not to suggest that weekly reviews were always
cheerleaders for experimental literature, but instead to contend that the way in which modern
poetry was discussed here is profoundly significant. The natures of various modernist literatures
were defined elsewhere: by writers and artists and thinkers across the globe, years prior to 1933.
But it is at moments such as this that the concept of modernism—note the shift to singular—
began to take shape in the public eye. The Listener takes issue with its sceptical readers and
defends its record of publishing new poetry; from that debate, a clearer sense of precisely what
the Listener defends emerges. While this editorial remains extraordinary, the process of
emergence that it charts was not: it happened week in and week out, through the 1920s and
1930s, in a range of magazines similar to the Listener. This is the history that this thesis offers.
*
It is not immediately clear that such a history has value for contemporary scholarship on
modernism. After all, modernism as represented by the Listener seems not only familiar but old-
fashioned: most clearly found in poetry, difficult, rejecting nineteenth-century models and
constructing a new tradition. This is modernism as seen by the New Criticism at mid-century;
MAKING UP MODERNISM
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more than this, it is modernism as found in T. S. Eliot’s ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’
and ‘The Metaphysical Poets’. When one reads a wider selection of these magazines, it
becomes starkly evident that these periodicals, and the texts they discuss, are unapologetically
Anglocentric; they see little of literary culture outside of London; they give far greater
prominence to literature than to theatrical or visual art, or to music. They are overwhelmingly
owned and written by men, and grant the majority of their coverage to male authors. When
one reads modernism as seen by these periodicals, one sees a modernism that might have been
extracted from university syllabi forty or fifty years ago: James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf,
D. H. Lawrence, (sometimes) Ezra Pound.
Naturally, I argue that the study of these magazines and of modernism in this way is
highly relevant, even if it initially appears antiquated. In the last twenty years, scholarship on
modernism has undergone wide-ranging pluralization. Douglas Mao and Rebecca L.
Walkowitz’s 2008 essay in PMLA announced the ‘new modernist studies’, and suggested that
the study of modernism is characterized by expansion.7 They named three axes: temporal, spatial,
and vertical. Temporal expansion pushes the period boundaries of modernism and modernity
well into the nineteenth century, and incorporates the late twentieth century. One has only to
note the shift from Bradbury and McFarlane’s excellent Modernism (1976), which runs from
1890 to 1930, to Peter Nicholls’s Modernisms (1995, 2nd edn 2009), which begins with Baudelaire
in the mid-nineteenth century.8 A 2014 conference organized by the British Association of
Modernist Studies (BAMS) was entitled ‘Modernism Now!’; Jacqueline Rose, one of the
keynote speakers, read Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-formed Thing (2013) in the titular
context: a novel that was modernist, now.9 Perhaps more radically, Susan Stanford Friedman
7 Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, ‘The New Modernist Studies’, PMLA, 123 (2008), 737-48.
8 Modernism: A Guide to European Literature, 1890-1930, ed. by Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976); Peter Nicholls, Modernisms: a Literary Guide, 2nd edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2009). This comparison is rooted in Michael Whitworth’s note that Nicholls’s work ‘seems likely to
achieve the same status as Bradbury and McFarlane’s 1976 volume’. Modernism, ed. by Michael H. Whitworth
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), p. 297.
9 Jacqueline Rose, ‘Modernism—The Unfinished Legacy’, paper at ‘Modernism Now!’, London, 26 June 2014;
Eimear McBride, A Girl Is A Half-formed Thing (Norwich: Galley Beggar Press, 2013).
MAKING UP MODERNISM
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has called for the abolition of period boundaries altogether. She argues for a ‘relational
approach’ to the terms modern/modernity/modernism, one that ‘stresses the condition or
sensibility of radical disruption and accelerating change wherever and whenever such a
phenomenon appears’.10
With the words ‘wherever and whenever’ Friedman links an argument about
periodization to the spatial expansion later identified by Mao and Walkowitz. This scholarship
emphasizes that modernism took place in different places, as well as different times; as
Friedman suggests, the two are often connected. This scholarship has been prolific: the Oxford
Handbook of Global Modernisms ranges from Cuba to Vietnam, China to South Africa.11 In a 2006
essay, Friedman emphasizes the radical potential of these twin expansions; her ‘planetary
approach to modernism requires […] jettisoning the ahistorical designation of modernism as a
collection of identifiable aesthetic styles, and abandoning as well the notion of modernism as an
aesthetic period whose singular temporal beginning and endpoints are determinable’. Instead,
modernism is the ‘expressive dimension of modernity’; there is no ‘single period of modernism’,
but instead the ‘plural periods of modernisms’.12
Mao and Walkowitz’s third axis—vertical expansion—again denotes a far-reaching shift.
The vertical reconfiguration exerts a kind or degree of disruptive force on modernist studies that it
may not on any other period-based field, since for many years modernism was understood as,
precisely, a movement by and for a certain kind of high (cultured mandarins) as against a certain
kind of low (the masses, variously regarded as duped by the ‘culture industry’, admirably free of
elitist self-absorption, or simply awaiting the education that would make the community of
cognoscenti a universal one).13
There are many instances of modernist artists envisaging themselves as masculine and vigorous,
against a passive and feminized official culture, as argued by Andreas Huyssen.14 But this was
not always the case, and Lawrence Rainey’s argument that modernism’s imagined isolation
10 Susan Stanford Friedman, ‘Definitional Excursions: The Meanings of Modern/Modernity/Modernism’,
Modernism/modernity, 8 (2001), 493-513 (p. 503).
11 See The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms, ed. by Mark A. Wollaeger and Matt Eatough (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2012).
12 Susan Stanford Friedman, ‘Periodizing Modernism: Postcolonial Modernities and the Space/Time Borders of
Modernist Studies’, Modernism/modernity, 13 (2006), 425-43 (p. 432).
13 Mao and Walkowitz, ‘The New Modernist Studies’, p. 738.
14 Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1986).
MAKING UP MODERNISM
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from mass culture and the marketplace was, itself, a marketing strategy is a crucial precursor to
more recent work.15 Mao and Walkowitz term this reconfiguration ‘vertical’ because rather
than isolating modernism from wider cultural and social contexts, scholars now tend to perceive
modernism as implicated in those contexts. Work on modernism and periodicals falls into this
category, and is discussed below; while the overall scope of research in this area is too broad to
be covered here, it can usefully be noted that in recent years winners of the annual Modernist
Studies Association book prize have included monographs on modernism and the practice of
collecting, Irish modernism and public utilities, modernism and speed, modernism and the
nocturnal cityscape of New York.16 This in no way represents an adequate selection of recent
work. Perhaps the best mark of the shift in critical thought over the past fifteen or so years is
that Mao and Walkowitz’s analysis is still very useful, but the label new seems slightly outmoded.
Yet despite the expansion in modernist studies—stretching across the globe, across the
centuries, across cultural forms—modernism and modernist have survived as the critical labels of
choice. It is putting the case too strongly to say that this is surprising—there were many
different modern movements, and modernism is nothing if not a flexible term—but it was
hardly inevitable. Indeed, the recent expansion has led some scholars to question the use of the
term altogether. Introducing his Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms, Mark Wollaeger asks the
pertinent question.
Is it productive to discuss under the rubric of modernism literary movements that assigned
themselves (or later were assigned) different names, be they modernismo, futurisme, modanizumu,
moderna, vanguardismo, chư nghĩa hiên đa, or avant-garde?17
Chris Baldick, writing a volume of the Oxford English Literary History on the early twentieth
century, moves away from the term entirely. Instead, he uses ‘the modern movement’, arguing
that ‘modernist’ overprivileges experimental writers, and that ‘there are many ways of being
15 Lawrence S. Rainey, Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1998).
16 Jeremy Braddock, Collecting as Modernist Practice (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011); Michael
Rubenstein, Public Works: Infrastructure, Irish Modernism, and the Postcolonial (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame
Press, 2010); Enda Duffy, The Speed Handbook: Velocity, Pleasure, Modernism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009);
William Chapman Sharpe, New York Nocturne: The City After Dark in Literature, Painting, and Photography, 1850-1950
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).
17 Global Modernisms, ed. by Wollaeger and Eatough, p. 3.
MAKING UP MODERNISM
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modern’.18 This is very true, but Baldick’s clean rejection of modernism remains rare. It is far
more common for writers to stretch the definitional possibilities of the word modernism, à la
Friedman. When the word by itself will not do, prefixes or adjectives are used.19 Kristin
Bluemel writes of ‘intermodernism’, writing that seems to slip through the cracks of even
generous definitions of modernism.20 Tyrus Miller’s work on late modernism has been
particularly influential.21
Thus the term remains useful. However, as modernist studies has undergone a welcome
expansion, some critics have questioned whether modernism has lost definition: if all things can
be modernist, then what specific value has modernism? Friedman provides an intriguing coda
to her 2001 essay on modernism that both interrogates this problem, and is sympathetic to it.
Rather than offering ‘yet another definition of modernity and modernism’, she attempts to ‘shift
attention to the processes and patterns of definitional contestation’.
Definitional dissonance matters. The fact of not only diverse but downright opposite meanings
signifies. These differences should not be ignored as accidental or arbitrary, the ordinary product
of disciplinary background or semantic disagreement. Nor should they be tamed with the deceptive
inclusiveness of pluralism.22
This is all well and good, but as Friedman herself notes in 2006, it is somewhat difficult to work
with.23 To emphasize the differences within modernisms and deny common ground may well
lead one to the stark conclusions that Perry Anderson perceptively drew in 1984.
Modernism as a notion is the emptiest of all cultural categories. Unlike the terms Gothic,
Renaissance, Baroque, Mannerist, Romantic, or Neo-Classical, it designates no describable object
in its own right at all: it is completely lacking in positive content. […] There is no other aesthetic
marker so vacant or vitiated.24
18 Chris Baldick, The Oxford English Literary History: Volume 10, 1910-1940: The Modern Movement (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2004), p. 5.
19 The prefix ‘post’—as in postmodernism—is clearly an exceptional case, and is not relevant here.
20 Kristin Bluemel, George Orwell and the Radical Eccentrics: Intermodernism in Literary London (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2004); Intermodernism: Literary Culture in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain, ed. by Kristin Bluemel (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2009).
21 Tyrus Miller, Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts Between the World Wars (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1999). Questions of late modernism are discussed further in Chapter 5.
22 Friedman, ‘Definitional Excursions’, p. 510.
23 Friedman, ‘Periodizing Modernism’, p. 433.
24 Perry Anderson, ‘Modernity and Revolution’, New Left Review, 144 (1984), 96-113 (pp. 112-13).
MAKING UP MODERNISM
13
I appreciate the theoretical worry that leads in this direction, but I cannot endorse this
conclusion. Imperfect as twenty-first century definitions of modernism may be, those definitions
have a history, and that history is worthy of study in its own right.
These definitional histories have not escaped criticism. Michael Whitworth’s brief
analysis usefully notes that ‘In their aesthetic sense, “modernism” and “modernist” were used
by actual artists and writers in the 1910s and 1920s, and were used increasingly in the 1930s’.25
Whitworth makes the point noted in my own analysis of the Listener editorial, that the term was
frequently deployed by anti-modernist critics. Modernism: Keywords (2014), inspired by Raymond
Williams and written by Melba Cuddy-Keane, Adam Hammond, and Alexandra Peat, traces
uses of ‘modern’ and ‘modernism’ from idiosyncratic moments in Hardy and Whitman to the
gradually developing association with experimental art through the early twentieth century.26
Both Whitworth and Modernism: Keywords note the fact that modernism had a technical use in
Catholic theology around the turn of the century, a use that, as Finn Fordham argues, had an
underestimated influence on the aesthetic understanding of the word.27
As a term, modernism may now be most frequently encountered in the academy and
the classroom, but its history is not limited to these locations. The creation of modernist art is
entangled with manifold attempts to classify that art. I contend that there is significant space
within these attempts for close scholarly exploration of how such classifications developed: how
modernism took shape as a concept in the public sphere. At this point, it is useful to clarify the
way in which I use the terms ‘modernist’ and ‘modernism’. This thesis certainly pays attention
to the varying—and sometimes highly unusual—terms used to classify literature or ideas about
literature that we would now call modernist. Correspondingly, I am interested in early
appearances of the words ‘modernism’ and ‘modernist’ in the periodicals under study. However,
my primary focus is on how the concept of modernism took shape: not only how periodicals
25 Modernism, ed. by Whitworth, p. 40.
26 Melba Cuddy-Keane, Adam Hammond and Alexandra Peat, Modernism: Keywords (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell,
2014), pp. 139-46.
27 Finn Fordham, ‘Between Theological and Cultural Modernism: the Vatican's Oath Against Modernism,
September 1910’, Literature and History, 22 (2013), 8-24.
MAKING UP MODERNISM
14
chose to name new literature, but the precise nature and influence of their analysis. This can
involve consideration of ways of naming modern literature—in Chapter 1, I discuss Sylvia
Lynd’s description of Virginia Woolf as a ‘mystic realist’—but often also explores other aspects
of the literary criticism practiced by these magazines. In Chapter 2, I consider Vita Sackville-
West’s review of Ernst Toller, and the way in which she openly connects Toller to T. S. Eliot’s
The Waste Land while also playfully echoing Eliot’s poem throughout her review.
As my target is thus the concept of modernism itself, and how it developed publicly,
when I write of modernism and modernist literature in these magazines, it might be more
proper to write of that-which-would-later-come-to-be-called-modernism. In the pursuit of brevity and
simplicity, however, I refrain from continually restating these qualifications, and continue to use
the terms ‘modernist’ and ‘modernism’, even when I write of how the concept that those terms
refer to came into being. I judge this ultimately less confusing than the alternative.
There is something of this focus on how the concept of modernism took public form in
Michael North’s Reading 1922 (1999). In the first pages of that work, North argues for the value
of a critical turn towards how readers experienced modernism in 1922.
The ‘matrix of modernism’, to take the title of one very accomplished study, is generally
constructed in temporal terms, as a genealogy, and is restricted to literature and perhaps
philosophy. Such a study produces, as a necessary effect of its interpretative method, a modernism
that lives primarily in the deepest imaginings of its most radical perpetrators. But what of
modernism as a social fact, as part of the lived experience of a reader of The Waste Land or Ulysses,
who also lived in the world of incipient revolt[?] […] What connections might have been made in
the mind of such a reader between literary modernism and the other innovations of the same
year?28
North cites a 1985 study by Sanford Schwartz, but The Matrix of Modernism is only one example
in a fine critical tradition of histories of modernism. To take just a brief selection, one might
point to work from critics as diverse as Bradbury and McFarlane, Levenson, Calinescu, and
Eysteinsson—and this is only selecting from works that tend to construct modernism in the
most traditional sense.29 North’s own project differs greatly from this one, but the purpose is
28 Michael North, Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p.
6.
29 Modernism, ed. by Bradbury and McFarlane; Michael H. Levenson, A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English
Literary Doctrine, 1908-1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of
MAKING UP MODERNISM
15
similar: not simply a focus on the culture and society of the early twentieth century that
produced Ulysses and The Waste Land (to take North’s examples), but a search for the sense of
modernism as ‘social fact’; an emerging and almost tangible phenomenon, in the air of early
twentieth-century modernity.
To be clear, this thesis does not fill this gap in the scholarship completely: there is much
further work to be done. This thesis studies mainstream sixpenny weekly magazines, in the
1920s and 1930s. It opens with the founding of Time and Tide in May 1920, a date far later than
most histories of modernism itself. The reasoning behind this is simply that as the focus is on
responses to modernism in mainstream periodicals, rather than on modernism itself,
modernism had to begin and continue happening in order to be discussed and represented in
mainstream literary culture. While there are famous moments of public and publicized
modernist shock and awe before 1920—the Post-Impressionist Exhibitions come to mind—it is
in the twenties and thirties, I argue, that the concept begins to be taken seriously by mainstream
culture.
On the other hand, this is not a history of wholly retrospective responses. It seems clear
that the concept of modernism takes on a particularly clear and stable form once it seems to be
in the rear view mirror, so to speak. As the discussion above on the temporal expansion of
modernism makes clear, to place an end date on modernism is not easy and is certainly beyond
the scope of this thesis. However, it is worthwhile to note that there is an extremely important
difference between a 1934 essay by Lucia Trent and Ralph Cheyney, ‘What is This
Modernism?’, and a 1960 essay by Harry Levin, ‘What Was Modernism?’.30 Levin’s essay (one
of the first to emphasize the importance of 1922 for the publishing of modernist texts) performs
a clear analysis of modernism that seems to illustrate Hegel’s famous argument that the history
and philosophy of an era can only be written once it has ended: ‘The owl of Minerva flies only
Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987); Ástráður
Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990).
30 Lucia Trent and Ralph Cheyney, More Power to Poets: A Plea for More Poetry in Life, More Life in Poetry (New York:
Henry Harrison, 1934), pp. 106-110; Harry Levin, ‘What Was Modernism?’, The Massachussetts Review, 1 (1960),
609-30.
MAKING UP MODERNISM
16
with the dusk’. 31 Trent and Cheyney are excitable, brief, idiosyncratic and somewhat
dictatorial: in many ways, everything that writers for mainstream weekly magazines were not.
But their sense of attempting to explore something that is still in the process of coming into
being—what is this modernism?—is just that which writers for (say) the Spectator try to do. As
will become clear, the Spectator is duller and more cynical and more serious. Yet it is historically
significant: these magazines explored modernism, and modernism came further and more
securely into the public sphere. This thesis ends in 1937, at a point where modernism’s public
position approaches stability. At the same time, though, this date should not be taken as a clear
historical break, a date after which modernism had an unarguably clear and stable form. As I
argue in the final chapter, the very notion of an end date for modernism’s public emergence is
complex and unclear.
*
My use of the term ‘public sphere’ is derived from Jürgen Habermas. The Structural
Transformation of the Public Sphere was first published in German in 1962, but did not appear in
English until 1989. Habermas famously argued that the bourgeois public sphere arose where
‘the sphere of private people came together as a public’, to engage in debate in a way that
Habermas understood as unprecedented: ‘people’s public use of their reason’.32 He names this
‘rational-critical public debate’ (p. 28), and while it is clear in his responses to his critics that he
acknowledges the many flaws in this model, Habermas ultimately does idealize this public
sphere, and does regard it as a historical phenomenon.33 Crucially—and promisingly, for the
arguments posed by this thesis—Habermas suggests that bourgeois public sphere first arose in
discussions about literature; particularly, in London coffee houses.
31 Hegel's Philosophy of Right, trans. by T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1942), p. 13.
32 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans.
by Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), p. 27. Further references to this
volume are given after quotations in the text.
33 See Jürgen Habermas, ‘Further Reflections on the Public Sphere’, in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. by Craig
Calhoun (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), pp. 421-61.
MAKING UP MODERNISM
17
Literature had to legitimate itself in these coffee houses […] This critical debate ignited by works of
literature and art was soon extended to include economic and political disputes, without any
guarantee […] that such discussions would be inconsequential. (p. 33)
However, Habermas’s account is oriented around the structural transformation of this public
sphere—which is to say, its collapse. By the early twentieth century, it is quite clear that
rational-critical debate is no longer possible. He writes of ‘the disintegration of the public
sphere in the world of letters’.
The sounding board of an education stratum tutored in the public use of reason has been
shattered; the public is split apart into minorities of specialists who put their reason to use
nonpublicly and the great mass of consumers whose receptiveness is public but uncritical.
Consequently, it completely lacks the form of communication specific to a public. (p. 175)
In particular, Habermas scorns modern media, a grouping that clearly includes twentieth
century periodicals.
The world fashioned by the mass media is a public sphere in appearance only. By the same token
the integrity of the public sphere which they promise to their consumers is also an illusion.
Before, ‘private people interpreted this new form of existence’ through the public sphere; now,
‘the mass media […] strip away the literary husks from that kind of bourgeois self-interpretation
and utilize them as marketable forms for the public services provided in a culture of consumers’
(p. 171).
At the very end of the text, Habermas offers the possibility of a future public sphere, but
does not seem to hold out much hope.
There also exists the rare relationship between publicist organs devoted to rational-critical debate
and those few individuals who still seek to form their opinions through literature—a kind of
opinion capable of becoming public, but actually non-public. The communicative network of a
public made up of rationally debating private citizens has collapsed; the public opinion once
emergent from it has partly decomposed into the informal opinions of private citizens without a
public and partly become concentrated into formal opinions of publicistically effective institutions.
(p. 247)
Habermas’s understanding here is heavily indebted to Adorno’s model of the cultural industries,
as Nicholas Garnham notes.34 Certainly, it does not seem to bode well for a discussion of
modernism in the public sphere, discussed by magazines: the public sphere has ‘collapsed’,
there is no ‘communicative network’, but only ‘formal opinions’.
34 Nicholas Garnham, ‘The Media and the Public Sphere’, in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. by Craig Calhoun
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), pp. 359-76 (p. 360).
MAKING UP MODERNISM
18
Of course, one can disagree with the doom and gloom of Habermas’s historical analysis,
even if his model of a public sphere has proved consistently provocative. But in this case, I point
out Habermas’s understanding of the disintegration of the public sphere in order to emphasize
that, in suggesting a public oriented around mainstream weekly magazines, I am not proposing
that these magazines somehow hosted an idealized public sphere of unfettered rational-critical
debate, as Habermas imagines it in the eighteenth century. Whether or not such a thing ever
existed, I do not propose to argue that it happened here. The public role played by mainstream
weekly magazines is derived from Habermas, but does not entirely resemble a fully fledged
public sphere.
Put another way, the claims made by this argument are less radical than those made by
Habermas. The five magazines discussed here printed texts that reviewed new books and the
state of literary culture; sometimes, to a limited extent, those texts actively debated with one
another, though those responses were not utopic rational-critical debate, but long textual
dialogues characterized (inevitably) by long articles written by each participant, separated by
weeks between them. One might also construct debates and dialogues between texts that
appeared together in the periodical; while this is clearly important from a literary critical
perspective, it is again not rational-critical debate as Habermas envisaged it. Thus while it was
used above, I tend to avoid the term ‘public sphere’: the implications of a space of free-flowing,
energetic debate go too far. Instead, I tend to refer to ‘public culture’. This term still contains
useful echoes of Habermas’s public sphere, but lacks the more radical implications of ‘sphere’.
These magazines, then, are worthy of study as periodicals, rather than as actors in a
utopic public sphere. As periodicals, it is important to note that studying the weekly review in
this way develops the burgeoning field of modernist periodical studies. It is almost now
axiomatic to point out how important periodicals are seen to be to modernism; perhaps the best
and most concise statement of the current state of the field is that of Robert Scholes and
Clifford Wulfman, who write simply that ‘Modernism happened in the magazines all right, but
MAKING UP MODERNISM
19
it didn’t only happen in the little ones’.35 Colloquialisms are telling: that ‘all right’ signals just
how accepted and expected the role of the periodical now is. This is a sea change: Jason
Harding noted in a recent talk that, when he wrote his thesis on Eliot’s Criterion (at Cambridge,
submitted 2000), he was asked whether it was actually possible to do one’s doctorate on a
magazine.36
Scholes and Wulfman’s signal that the study of modernism and magazines needs to
move away from a focus on just the ‘little ones’ only underlines the extent to which the study of
modernism and magazines has traditionally been understood as the study of modernism and
the little magazine. Definition of what exactly constitutes ‘little’ has been a topic of critical
debate, but Suzanne Churchill and Adam McKible give a detailed and useful definition.
little magazines are non-commercial enterprises founded by individuals or small groups intent
upon publishing the experimental works or radical opinions of untried, unpopular, or under-
represented writers. Defying mainstream tastes and conventions, some little magazines aim to
uphold higher artistic and intellectual standards than their commercial counterparts, while others
seek to challenge conventional political wisdom and practice. These two approaches, aesthetic
experimentation and political radicalism, are not necessarily mutually exclusive, although this was
often the case prior to the 1930s. Because of their often unorthodox contents, little magazines
appeal to small, sometimes elite (or elitist) readerships willing to exercise their minds to
comprehend aesthetic movements such as Futurism, Imagism, and Dada, or to contemplate
political movements such as anarchism, socialism, and feminism. Although the term ‘little’ refers to
the magazine’s small audience (as compared to mass market audiences), rather than to its size,
significance, budget, or lifespan, these journals are characteristically but not exclusively small-
budget operations with short runs. Whatever the format, scope, or preferred topics of conversation,
little magazines tend to share two features: a vexed relationship to a larger, mainstream public and
an equally vexed relationship to money.37
This understanding of little magazines has rung broadly true for several decades of scholarship.
Churchill and McKible’s definition also echoes Scholes and Wulfman’s choice of verb
(‘modernism happened in the magazines’), in that it explicitly takes the periodicals themselves
as active participants in the history of modernism. Modernism was not just found in periodicals,
it happened in them.
35 Robert Scholes and Clifford Wulfman, Modernism in the Magazines: An Introduction (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2010), p. 41.
36 Jason Harding, ‘The Use and Abuse of Archives: Reading the Criterion and Encounter Magazines’, paper at
‘Modernist Magazines Research Seminar’, London, 20 February 2014. Harding’s thesis was later published; see
Jason Harding, The Criterion: Cultural Politics and Periodical Networks in Inter-War Britain (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2002).
37 Little Magazines & Modernism: New Approaches, ed. by Suzanne W. Churchill and Adam McKible (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2007), pp. 6-7.
MAKING UP MODERNISM
20
By contrast, the earliest scholarship on modernism and periodicals remains important in
bibliographical terms but tends to treat magazines as useful merely for the important texts that
they may have hosted within their pages. The landmark study of the mid-twentieth century,
Hoffman, Allen and Ulrich’s The Little Magazines: A History and a Bibliography (1946), betrays its
intentions within its title, and begins by suggesting that the importance of the little magazine lies
in the fact that they published ‘about 80 per cent of our most important post-1912 critics,
novelists, poets, and storytellers’.38 Under this model, magazines have no power to act as agents
of change themselves, but are mere receptacles for famous works and artists. The most famous
modernist little magazines did appear in scholarship, but largely because of what or who
appeared in them: Wyndham Lewis’s BLAST, for instance, which ran for two issues and printed
the Vorticist Manifesto, or the Little Review, which printed part of Ulysses.
In the scholarly eye, magazines move from a passive to an active role only in the last
decades of the twentieth century. Lawrence Rainey’s important Institutions of Modernism
foreshadowed the thrust of much later work in a chapter on the publication history of The Waste
Land, demonstrating how negotiations between Pound and the editors of the Dial and Vanity Fair
shaped the poem’s eventual appearance in 1922.39 But one of the first and most important texts
which can be recognized as fully engaged in the study of modernist little magazines is Mark
Morrisson’s The Public Face of Modernism (2001). Morrisson organizes his book ‘not around
individual authors, but rather around magazines’, and is aware that he is doing something new,
suggesting that, since Hoffman, Allen and Ulrich, ‘almost no scholarship has explored the
material practices and genre markers of the modernist magazines themselves as a field of
study’.40 Morrisson sees little magazines as ‘forums’, and argues that they brought modernism
into public discourse; this key moment represents something of a paradigm shift for critical
work on little magazines.
38 Frederick J. Hoffman, Charles Allen and Carolyn F. Ulrich, The Little Magazine: a History and a Bibliography
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946), p. 1.
39 See Ch. 3, ‘The Price of Modernism: Publishing The Waste Land’. Rainey, Institutions of Modernism, pp. 77-106.
40 Mark S. Morrisson, The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception, 1905-1920 (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), p. 10.
MAKING UP MODERNISM
21
Since the turn of the century, the volume of scholarship that understands magazines
along broadly these lines has exploded. It is perhaps even more important to acknowledge the
still-developing Modernist Journals Project at Brown University and the University of Tulsa,
which has digitized dozens of the most well-known and important modernist magazines and
thus opened access to periodicals to a wider range of scholars. Beyond giving magazines an
active role, recent work has explored an intimate entanglement between modernism and
magazines; Churchill and McKible are again useful:
Little magazines provide a record of the large-scale conversation that became modernism, an odd
and absorbing concourse that cannot be reduced to a single movement or coherent set of
principles. These periodicals […] reveal modernism to be a complex network of artistic, social,
political, economic, and technological activities. Presenting multiple voices and perspectives,
crossing disciplinary boundaries, and both resisting and engaging mass culture, little magazines
collectively represent the development of modernist art and modern ideas at least as well as
Prufrock’s monologue.41
The range of scholarship is immense, and cannot be adequately summarized here. Scholes and
Wulfman’s work, discussed above, is a useful introductory overview; Churchill and McKible’s
edited collection similarly contains a number of key essays. Research on the importance of
individual magazines includes Jason Harding on Eliot’s Criterion, Faith Binckes on Mansfield
and Murry’s Rhythm, Suzanne Churchill on Others, Ann Ardis on the New Age.42 Cathryn Setz’s
work on transition is forthcoming. The field now has its own journal: the Journal of Modern
Periodical Studies, published by Penn State University Press. Moreover, the influence of periodical
studies is felt in works with a broader remit; Laura Marcus’s work on cinema and modernism
features a central chapter on a film periodical, Close-Up.43 For Adam McKible, little magazines
in New York offer a way to talk about the relationship between American modernism and the
1917 Russian revolution.44
41 Little Magazines & Modernism: New Approaches, ed. by Churchill and McKible, p. 5.
42 Harding, The Criterion; Faith Binckes, Modernism, Magazines, and the British Avant-Garde (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2010); Suzanne W. Churchill, The Little Magazine ‘Others’ and the Renovation of Modern American Poetry (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2006); Ann Ardis, ‘The Dialogics of Modernism(s) in the New Age’, Modernism/modernity, 14 (2007), 407-34.
43 Laura Marcus, The Tenth Muse: Writing About Cinema in the Modernist Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
44 Adam McKible, The Space and Place of Modernism: The Russian Revolution, Little Magazines, and New York (New York:
Routledge, 2002).
MAKING UP MODERNISM
22
However, in recent years the bulk of new work on modernism and magazines has been
concentrated in a mammoth project led by Andrew Thacker and Peter Brooker, the Oxford
Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines.45 The three volumes cover Britain and Ireland,
North America, and Europe. The scope of the project is immense: taking just the first volume,
covering Britain and Ireland from 1880 to 1955, the volume prints thirty-seven essays that,
between them, cover eighty-four periodicals. In addition, Brooker and Thacker’s ‘General
Introduction’ is a lucid and incisive discussion of the nature of a modernist magazine, and
introduces the concept of ‘periodical codes’ (adapted from Jerome McGann’s bibliographic
codes) that proves an valuable way to discuss the weekly reviews explored by this thesis.46 As the
breadth of such a project implies, the Oxford History covers not only the canonical British
modernist magazines (Rhythm, BLAST), but periodicals from the thirties and later (Scrutiny,
Horizon, Poetry London), magazines particularly interested in Wales, Scotland, and Ireland,
magazines focused particularly on the visual arts. Notably, there is significant discussion of
some more mainstream periodicals, as J. Matthew Huculak writes on J. C. Squire’s conservative
London Mercury, and Jane Dowson writes on Time and Tide, one of the magazines discussed by
this thesis.
The sheer breadth of Brooker and Thacker’s work has intriguing theoretical
consequences that have a direct bearing on this thesis. They are very aware that the study of
modernism and periodicals has developed beyond a narrow focus on the classical little
magazine, and think carefully both about the ways in which different types of magazine played
different roles, and how those differences were not stable.
[There is a] distinction between the minority ‘little magazine’ and mainstream publications and
their respective relations to dominant cultural attitudes, mores, and economies. It is a mistake
clearly […] to see this relation as a static binary opposition of distinct, homogenous areas. If
mainstream or hegemonic culture, by definition, exercises power it does so for the most part by
45 The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, ed. by Peter Brooker and others, 3 vols (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2009-2013). Brooker and Thacker edited all three volumes; on the third volume covering
Europe, additional editorial roles were taken on by Sascha Bru and Christian Weikop.
46 Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, ‘General Introduction’, in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist
Magazines: Volume I, Britain and Ireland 1880-1955, ed. by Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2009), pp. 1-26 (pp. 6-9). For McGann’s bibliographic codes, see Jerome McGann, The Textual
Condition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).
MAKING UP MODERNISM
23
gaining consent and through strategies of exclusion, negotiation, or assimilation. Magazines in
their turn, existing on the margins, and as part of a stratified counter or subaltern public sphere,
contest, appropriate, and negotiate with this dominant realm. […] We need a flexible and dialogic
version of this distinction between spheres to understand the dynamic of the avant-garde and the
relative stability, over time, of a ‘normalized’ modernism, overtaken, side-stepped, or made new
again by its inheritors.47
Of course, Brooker and Thacker choose their terminology very carefully, and title their whole
project a study of the modernist magazine, rather than of the little magazine. They argue that this
term ‘oversees a reflection on this very category and serves to introduce a set of case studies of
magazines which participated in the making of a ‘modernist’ cultural aesthetic and the institution
of modernism’.48
These two things might relate to very different magazines: Rhythm, printing Mansfield’s
short stories next to reproductions of Picasso paintings, might be said to have made a modernist
cultural aesthetic; more mainstream periodicals, by bringing these ideas to a wider and more
general audience, might have made modernism as institution. Across the impressively broad
range of essays in the collection, there is a slight looseness between this acknowledgement of
diversity, and the tendency of the adjective ‘modernist’ to imply selection. If one can point to a
modernist magazine, one must also be able to point to a non-modernist magazine, otherwise the
adjective loses all descriptive value. Again, Brooker and Thacker are not unaware of the
importance of this selective principle.
Our judgment over what to count as a ‘modernist magazine’ has centred upon an understanding
of the dominant character of a magazine, of how it contains sufficient material to constitute some
version of modernism or significant discussion of modernism, or is closely related to other
important contemporary cultural formations or attitudes towards the newness of social
modernity.49
In other words, both editors are keen to emphasize that a ‘judgment’ has been made; that the
magazines chosen deserve the adjective given to them.
The judgments made by the Oxford History are good ones, but it must be acknowledged
that the overall impulse is inclusive, rather than exclusive. Brooker and Thacker’s stated criteria
for making judgments is broad and flexible, and it would indeed be possible to make a case for
47 Brooker and Thacker, ‘Introduction’, p. 16.
48 Brooker and Thacker, ‘Introduction’, p. 11.
49 Brooker and Thacker, ‘Introduction’, p. 11.
MAKING UP MODERNISM
24
the magazines considered by this thesis as ‘modernist magazines’, most easily under the
argument that they ‘constitute […] significant discussion of modernism’. However, I choose not
to, and argue that while these magazines certainly discussed modernism, it is productive to
reject the adjective ‘modernist’.
This argument should not be construed as a criticism of Brooker and Thacker’s
selection criteria or choice of label. One of the many virtues of the Oxford History volumes is
their breadth, a breadth that could arguably not have been achieved with more restrictive
criteria. In attempting to write about modernism and periodicals after Brooker and Thacker,
however, I argue for the importance of a turn towards mainstream periodicals and mainstream
periodicals alone. To be blunt, these are not modernist magazines, but they matter to
modernism still. In particular, I wish to drive a wedge between periodicals that ‘constitute some
version of modernism’ and those that host ‘significant discussion of modernism’, and focus on
the latter. In late 2012, in a short talk at King’s College London, Thacker referred to modernist
magazines as primary texts of modernism.50 He was making the point that Rhythm or the Little
Review should be understood as primary texts in much the same way as a copy of Ulysses or Mrs
Dalloway. I contend that the weekly reviews discussed here should be understood as some of the
first (though not of course the only) secondary texts of modernism. Their ‘dominant character’ is
not modernist, but they discussed and explored modernism in ways that demand critical
attention.
*
To borrow Brooker and Thacker’s useful phrase, the periodical codes of these
magazines were clear and consistent. They appeared—naturally—every week. More
specifically, they were published at the end of the working week: Time and Tide and the New
Statesman appeared on Friday, the Spectator and the Nation and Athenaeum appeared on Saturday.51
50 Andrew Thacker, ‘The Textual Culture of Modernism’, paper at ‘BAMS Postgraduate Training Day: Research
Skills’, London, 9 May 2013.
51 The Listener, tied to the BBC’s programmes rather than reporting the week’s news (although there is naturally a
certain level of coherence between the two), was the exception, and was published on Wednesdays.
MAKING UP MODERNISM
25
The page format was usually foolscap, though Time and Tide was slightly shorter and wider.52
The paper and printing was of higher quality than for a daily paper, but lower than that of an
illustrated magazine, or a monthly; they did not tend to carry pictures.53 They were printed in
monochrome only, in two columns. They kept, by and large, to a traditional typeface with
serifs.54 They all carried advertisements interspersed throughout the magazine, though overall
the number of advertisements was not high. Furthermore, the advertisements were broadly
similar: tobacco, insurance, and—in particular—publishers were well represented.55 All asked
for subscriptions, but achieved the majority of their sales through non-subscribing, cash-paying
customers.56 Most were priced at sixpence (hence the ‘sixpenny review’), though Time and Tide
was introduced at fourpence, rising to sixpence in 1928, and the Listener was introduced at
twopence, increasing to threepence from 1931. The value of treating these differently priced
magazines as sixpenny reviews is covered in the relevant chapters. Total circulations ranged
between a few thousand (where a magazine was definitely failing, or very new) to around ten
thousand (when it was not making a profit, but was usually making a sustainable loss backed by
patrons) to circulations in the high teens and low twenties, where money—in small amounts—
was being made.57 The business of running a weekly review was not, by and large, a profitable
one. The Spectator made money, as did the New Statesman from the mid-thirties onwards, but in
neither case were fortunes being made, as they had been, for example, in daily papers. Time and
52 A page of the New Statesman (a representative example) measures 8½ × 13¼ inches. Foolscap paper is sized at
17 × 13½ inches, equivalent to a double page spread. On paper sizes, see Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to
Bibliography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), p. 224.
53 The Listener, often the exception, was produced to a slightly higher quality and included more images, especially
images of paintings in the weekly art column.
54 Time and Tide’s sans-serif title was, for weekly reviews, the height of typographical experimentation.
55 The Listener also frequently advertised wireless manufacturers. In its first years, Time and Tide carried a large
volume of fashion advertisements; for further details, see Chapter 1, and Catherine Clay, ‘“WHAT WE MIGHT
EXPECT - If the Highbrow Weeklies Advertized like the Patent Foods”: Time and Tide, Advertising, and the
“Battle of the Brows”’, Modernist Cultures, 6 (2011), 60-95.
56 In 1928 and 1929, the Nation and Athenaeum sold around twenty per cent of its total circulation to subscribers. The
magazine was not doing particularly well at this point, and would soon be merged with the New Statesman (see
Chapter 5), but there is no indication in its financial records that the proportion of subscribers was particularly low or
high. Cambridge, King's College Special Collections (KCSC), J. M. Keynes Papers,
King's/PP/JMK/NS/4/2/110. For further detail on finances, see Appendix A.
57 See Appendix B.
MAKING UP MODERNISM
26
Tide, the Nation and Athenaeum, and the Listener never turned a profit, and were supported by
patronage in the first two cases and the institution of the BBC in the third.58
Even though this was not a profitable business, there were a good number of sixpenny
weekly reviews in the British periodical marketplace. The five studied here represent the most
significant members of the group, but they are not the only ones. Two additional possibilities
were considered and dismissed. The Saturday Review was enormously influential in the
nineteenth century, but declined in the 1920s and 1930s, shifting rapidly between different
owners. From 1933, it was owned by Lucy, Lady Houston, who used the periodical to praise
Hitler and Mussolini. The Week-end Review was founded in 1930 by members of the Saturday
Review staff who refused to endorse that paper’s support of the United Empire Party, but was
itself not particularly successful and was amalgamated into the New Statesman, in early 1934.59
While there may well be valuable scholarly work to be done on these two publications, I feel
that they are more marginal members of the group of weekly reviews. Therefore, I pass over
these two periodicals in order to maintain close attention on the five more central weekly
reviews covered by this study.
In addition to periodicity, format, and price, the make-up of the sixpenny weekly
reviews was consistent. They did not distort their form for important news: Appendix C reprints
the front pages of each of these magazines as they commented on the Wall Street Crash of
October 1929. Special issues were usually issued as a supplement—reviews of Christmas books,
for example—and were often paginated separately, maintaining the overall form of the paper.
The Spectator’s celebration of its centenary in 1928 used higher quality paper, but did not alter
the essential structure of the paper.
The structure itself was relatively simple. The first page featured a table of contents at
the top of the first column, following this immediately with unsigned leading articles that
58 The Listener’s price was kept at an artificially low mark to encourage sales; as a result, its circulation was by far
the highest, but it continually lost money.
59 In the New Statesman, the merger of the two papers was announced in the issue of 6 January 1934. The following
issue (13 January) was the first to include the Week-end Review on the title page.
MAKING UP MODERNISM
27
reviewed the news of the week, with a strong focus on politics. Following this, the review would
print longer articles on political or economic issues, which were frequently signed, and an
editorial, which typically was not. There were letters to the editor, sometimes a short poem, and
‘middles’: lighthearted articles, usually by famous if anonymous columnists writing under a
pseudonym. Following this, the cultural half of the paper begins, usually featuring articles on
music, art, or theatre, though rarely all three (most weekly reviews rotated their non-literary
cultural material). Then the literary editor’s page, which would review a group of books—not
necessarily fiction—under a theme, followed by book reviews of varying lengths, some signed
and some unsigned. The very end of the magazine was less clearly defined: some magazines
had a finance section, some competitions, some articles on hobbies such as gardening or sewing.
The division into political ‘half’ and cultural ‘half’ is long-lived, but has murky origins. It
is certainly true that the very first issue of the 1828 Spectator was made up in this way, printing its
first half as ‘The Spectator’, and literary half as ‘The Literary Spectator’.60 This structural
division has important consequences that are explored through this thesis, but here it suffices to
say that the assumption that the material that appears first has a higher priority holds true:
these were political magazines that had a literary element, not the other way around.
Weekly reviews were published regularly and consistently, and they all looked broadly
similar. But the material costs of the periodicals do not tell the whole story. The murkier
question of cultural identity and reputation is more difficult to measure. However, an attempt
can be made via the appearances of these periodicals in contemporary novels, where a
distinctive cultural image becomes clear: as suggested by the material codes, sixpenny weeklies
were dependable and uniform. Unlike little magazines, these are rarely exciting or provocative.
Instead, they are serious, even boring; dependable in a way that almost seems dull.
Needless to say, I do not find this to be an accurate understanding of the weekly review.
But it was, I think, a very real perception. Consider George Orwell in Homage to Catalonia (1937),
60 See the Spectator, 5 July 1828.
MAKING UP MODERNISM
28
as he imagines an England undisturbed by the horrors of war in Spain, an England that will
sleep until wakened ‘by the roar of bombs’.
Earthquakes in Japan, famines in China, revolution in Mexico? Don’t worry, the milk will be on
the doorstep tomorrow morning, the New Statesman will come out on Friday.61
Virginia Woolf is more cutting, writing in Night and Day (1919) of ‘the dear old ladies in mittens,
who read nothing but the Spectator, and snuff the candles’.62 In Jacob’s Room (1922), she depicts
the lodgings of George Plumer, one of Jacob’s tutors at Cambridge.
Cold grey eyes George Plumer had, but in them was an abstract light. He could talk about Persia
and the Trade winds, the Reform Bill and the cycle of the harvests. Books were on his shelves by
Wells and Shaw; on the table serious six-penny weeklies written by pale men in muddy boots—the
weekly creak and screech of brains rinsed in cold water and wrung dry—melancholy papers.63
The image is evocative and brutal: these are not, one might think, promising locations for the
study of modernism. Sixpenny weeklies are understood also in terms of what they are not—
chiefly, they are not cheaper twopenny weeklies, hugely popular magazines such as Punch and
John Bull that carried less political analysis and published more short fiction. In Crome
Yellow (1921), Aldous Huxley stages a conversation between protagonist Denis Stone, and the
popular, successful writer Mr Barbecue-Smith. Asked how quickly he writes, Stone admits that
he can sometimes ‘do a twelve-hundred-word review in about four hours’.64 Barbecue-Smith is
not impressed: he claims 3800 words in two and a half hours. He promises to help Denis out.
What was the fellow going to do? Denis wondered: give him an introduction to the editor of John
O’London’s Weekly, or tell him where he could sell a light middle for seven guineas? Mr Barbecue-
Smith patted his arm several times and went on.65
Stone snobbishly dismisses Barbecue-Smith’s journalism. Clearly associated with magazines
such as John O’London’s Weekly (a popular twopenny), Barbecue-Smith’s writing is effortless and,
by implication, meaningless.66 Against this, Denis’s writing is careful and compact, perhaps
destined for a sixpenny weekly. Barbecue-Smith does not seem to take literature very seriously;
61 George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (London: Penguin, 1989), p. 187.
62 Virginia Woolf, Night and Day, ed. by Julia Briggs (London: Penguin, 1992), p. 5.
63 Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room, ed. by Kate Flint (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 43.
64 Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow (London: Vintage, 2004), pp. 25-26.
65 Huxley, Crome Yellow, p. 26.
66 On John O’London’s Weekly, see Patrick Collier, ‘John O'London's Weekly and the Modern Author’, in Transatlantic
Print Culture, 1880-1940 : Emerging Media, Emerging Modernisms, ed. by Ann Ardis and Patrick Collier (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 98-113.
MAKING UP MODERNISM
29
Denis Stone is quite earnest. He is not, however, particularly associated with modernism; he is
instead a serious young critic, attempting to make his way in the literary world, and the
sixpenny weekly is implied to be a natural home.
Finally, Rose Macaulay—a prolific journalist—explored the periodical press in quite
some detail in her novels. When discussing the weekly reviews, she emphasizes their seriousness,
and their position as arbiters of respectable, intellectual taste. In Crewe Train (1926), Arnold
Chapel’s novel comes in for review, and is at first received poorly.
The weekend was better. A serious weekly periodical said that Mr Chapel’s first novel was one of
brilliant promise, and teemed with ideas. It devoted half a column to it, and depreciated another
novel by comparison.
Arnold justifies this positive review: ‘The Weekly Comment review is important, of course […] It’s
read by people who matter. It counts.’ He goes on:
The people who matter, in an intellectual sense, are the intelligent readers and critics. And a paper
is important, intellectually, if it’s written and read by intelligent and thoughtful people. As to
important…well, of course, it’s a relative word; it doesn’t stand by itself. Important for some people,
I suppose it means. More coffee, darling, please.67
Macaulay’s satire illustrates a self-absorbed and self-important group of literary critics and
writers who respond only to praise and treat people and experiences from outside their social
and cultural milieu with disdain; throughout the novel Arnold refuses to conceive of anything
more important than socializing in London with ‘people who matter’. The passage above
should be considered alongside a final example from Macaulay, in Potterism (1920), which
discusses the establishment of a new weekly paper run by Lord Pinkerton:
The Weekly Fact had become, as people said, quite an interesting and readable paper, brighter than
the Nation, more emotional than the New Statesman, gentler than the New Witness, spicier than
the Spectator, more chatty than the Athenaeum, so that one bought it on bookstalls and read it in
trains. […] There was also the new Pinkerton fourpenny, the Wednesday Chat […] Lord Pinkerton
had, in fact, with his usual acumen, sensed the existence of a great Fourpenny Weekly Public, and
given it, as was his wont, more than it desired or deserved. The sixpenny weekly public already had
its needs met; so had the penny, the twopenny, the threepenny, and the shilling public. Now the
fourpenny public, a shy and modest section of the community, largely clerical (in the lay sense of
the word) looked up and was fed. Those brains which could only with effort rise to the solid
political and economic information and cultured literary judgments meted out by the sixpennies,
67 Rose Macaulay, Crewe Train (London: Virago, 1998), pp. 127-28.
MAKING UP MODERNISM
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but which yet shrank from the crudities of our cheapest journals, here found something they could
read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest.68
Macaulay provides a humorous map of the periodical marketplace, with magazines for the
penny, twopenny, threepenny, fourpenny, sixpenny and shilling publics. They are separated by
degree rather than kind: reader might shy away from a sixpenny for a slightly easier
fourpenny.69 Again, however, the image is repeated: if the new Wednesday Chat is exciting,
sixpennies are not so bright, not so emotional, not so spicy, not so chatty. They doled out ‘solid
political and economic information and cultured literary judgments’. Hardly the stuff of
modernist energy, one might surmise.
In these magazines, then, there are few surprises and—especially if one focuses on the
unsympathetic caricatures—little excitement. Sixpenny weeklies are written by the serious,
cultured youth, who write their book reviews with care and authority. Woolf’s evocative and
unkind description of the ‘creak and screech’ of brains as men (and they all seem to be men)
with ‘muddy boots’ write these papers might jar slightly with Macaulay’s more metropolitan
writers, but the ultimate impression is similar: cultured young men, but hardly close to any type
of avant-garde. To put it cruelly—and I suspect Woolf’s images are meant to be cruel—these
papers seem to be written by men who were reading Bennett and Brooke rather than, say,
Baudelaire and Mallarmé, let alone Eliot and Pound. The readers hardly fare better from these
discussions: elderly, dependable, collecting the milk and never expecting the bombs. They are
imagined as people who are sure of their own authority and knowledge, informed by their
serious papers, yet never expecting to have their horizons tested or expanded. The prospect of
studying these periodicals is not promising.
*
68 Rose Macaulay, Potterism: A Tragi-Farcical Tract (London: W. Collins Sons & Co., 1920), pp. 251-52.
69 Whether or not there existed actual journals analogous to Macaulay’s fictional fourpenny is not a particularly
easy question to answer, though it does illustrate some of the pitfalls in sorting journals by price. Time and Tide was
introduced at fourpence, but seems to have always modelled itself on sixpennies, and increased its price to the
usual sixpence in 1928. Pinkerton’s Wednesday Chat is clearly imagined as a different affair; crucially, it appears not
at the weekend, but in the middle of the week. In this, it slightly resembles the Listener, though this too wished to
emulate (and become one of) the sixpenny reviews.
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The comments made in these novels are largely satirical. But the image constructed by
Orwell, Woolf, Huxley and Macaulay should be looked in the eye, rather than dismissed. I
cannot claim that these magazines were, in fact, aesthetically radical and experimental, at least
not for the vast majority of the time.70 They were solid, dependable, regular and serious. Yet
that very seriousness proves vitally important.
It should be noted—though it must also be expected—that these periodicals did not
describe themselves as serious or dull. In Chapter 1, I consider the founding of Time and Tide,
compared with the founding of a little magazine; where little magazines might often define
themselves by printing a manifesto, mainstream weeklies are more circumspect. Indeed, it is not
immediately apparent how these magazines pictured themselves, which itself signifies; reserve,
rather than aggressive self-definition and promotion is usually the order of the day. One
interesting moment of self-definition is however found in the Newspaper Press Directory, a annually
issued listing of newspapers and periodicals, printed largely to provide advertisers with contact
details and a sense of the character of each periodical. The entry for the Spectator in 1922 is
particularly revealing.
Principles: Liberal Unionist. The Spectator has a singularly condensed arrangement in its news
columns. Its original articles are written in a spirit of perfect independence, and evince the ability,
as well as the honesty, of the writers. As a force in the political arena there are few, if any, weekly
papers that can equal the Spectator. While maintaining its avowed policy at all times it is free from
bias, and its articles being invariably the work of authorities, its word is respected in the highest
circles.71
Of course, the Spectator has every reason to present itself as important and powerful. But the
tone of this piece nevertheless suggests how the dull, serious image provided by Woolf and
Orwell might relate to a cultural role: essentially, the Spectator is proposed as a paper that is
concerned, above all, with respectability and cultural authority. When faced with a piece of new
literature, one might expect a writer for the Spectator to ask whether that literature is worthy of
admittance to a respectable, admired realm of great, canonical writing.
70 Notable exceptions—the Listener’s poetry supplement in 1933, and the New Statesman’s publication of Joyce in
1932—are discussed in Ch. 4 and Ch. 5.
71 ‘The London Newspaper Press’, The Newspaper Press Directory, 77 (1922), 79-94 (p. 93).
MAKING UP MODERNISM
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Put another way, one does not expect these periodicals to be sympathetic towards
avant-gardes. This term is particularly useful in terms of what it is often defined against. Peter
Bürger’s classic Theory of the Avant-Garde (1984) argued that the practice of certain art movements
in the early twentieth century—Dada is the example he cites as the most extreme—was truly
radical. These were the ‘historical avant-gardes’.
The intention of the historical avant-garde movements was defined as the destruction of art as an
institution set off from the praxis of life. The significance of this intention is not that art as an
institution in bourgeois society was in fact destroyed and art thereby made a direct element in the
praxis of life, but that the weight that art as an institution has in determining the real social effect of
individual works becomes recognizable.72
For Bürger, the avant-gardes thus did not destroy the institution of art, but made it firmly
visible. Largely, Bürger does not use the term ‘modernism’, deploying it only when discussing
its use by another critic.73 But he does suggest that those that have come after the avant-gardes
have maintained the status of art as an institution.
Art has long since entered a post avant-gardiste phase. We characterise that phase by saying that it
revived the category of work and that the procedures invented by the avant-garde with antiartistic
intent are being used for artistic ends. This must not be judged a ‘betrayal’ of the aims of the
avant-garde movements (sublation of art as a social institution, uniting life and art) but the result of
a historical process that can be described in these very general terms: now that that attack of the
historical avant-garde movements on art as an institution has failed, and art has not been
integrated into the praxis of life, art as an institution continues to survive on something separate
from the praxis of life. (p. 57)
Jochen Schulte-Sasse, writing a foreword to Bürger, makes the implicit distinction clearer.
Titling it ‘Theory of Modernism versus Theory of the Avant-Garde’, Schulte-Sasse argues that,
for Bürger, one realises that ‘the theoretical emphases of modernist and avant-garde writers are
radically different’ (p. xv).
As a historian of the avant-garde, Bürger is not particularly concerned with exploring
the precise nature of ‘art as an institution’. Indeed, this concept is largely discussed in a wholly
72 Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. by Michael Shaw (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984),
p. 83. Further references to this volume are given after quotations in the text.
73 For example, Adorno’s use of modernism in Aesthetic Theory. See Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, pp. 59-63.
MAKING UP MODERNISM
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negative sense. Guy Debord, writing the manifesto of the Situationist International in 1957,
speaks of a recognizably similar concept in his derision for ‘the rigged game of official culture’.74
The ruling ideology arranges the trivialisation of subversive discoveries, and widely circulates them
after sterilization. It even succeeds in making use of subversive individuals: when dead, by
doctoring their works; when alive, thanks to the general ideological confusion, by drugging them
with one of the blind mystical beliefs in which it deals. It so happens that one of the contradictions
of the bourgeoisie in its stage of elimination is its respect for intellectual and artistic creation in
principle, while at first opposing its creations and then making use of them.75
Mainstream weeklies offer the opportunity to reclaim official culture, or at least to recognize
that it should be of interest to scholars of modernism. Arno Mayer’s discussion of the ancien
régime again argues for the perseverance of official cultures, their power, and their conservatism.
Despite or because of relentless challenges and gibes from the avant-garde, the producers and
guardians of official academic traditions remained at once imperious and adaptive. Like kings and
nobles, they learned to defuse ascending rivals through calibrated assimilation and co-optation.
And just as outworn economic interests made the most of their political leverage to secure
protective tariffs and fiscal preferments, so eminent artists used their influence in key hegemonic
institutions—academies, salons, museums, ministries of culture—to rally support for their
timeworn idioms.76
Notably, that list of ‘key hegemonic institutions’ does not include any that might seem
particularly attuned to assessing and reviewing literature. Mayer goes through countries and art
forms by turn, moving from the architecture of state institutions to the institutions of culture: in
Britain, he discusses the Houses of Parliament, the nineteenth century museums in South
Kensington, the Royal Academy, the National Gallery, the Tate.77 But again, there is little
place for literature.
A magazine like the Spectator clearly does not have quite the same relationship to
literature as an institution such as the Royal Academy does to visual art. Principally, institutions
like the Royal Academy operate proactively, providing education and granting explicit
recognition to individuals (for example, the status of ‘Royal Academician’); by contrast, the
Spectator was reactive, analysing works already published. However, the relationship between the
74 Guy Debord, ‘Report on the Construction of Situations and on the Terms of Organization and Action of the
International Situationist Tendency’, in Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents, ed. by Tom
McDonough (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), pp. 29-50 (p. 39).
75 Debord, ‘Report on the Construction of Situations’, p. 31.
76 Arno J. Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War (London: Croom Helm, 1981), p. 190.
77 Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime, pp. 197, 202, 217-19.
MAKING UP MODERNISM
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Spectator and literature is of a similar form to that of the Royal Academy and visual art. I suggest
that these magazines should be understood as institutions that sought to uphold official culture.
This should not simply be understood as a criticism. Notions of official culture—and critics that
attempted to speak of or for official culture—could of course be hidebound, bigoted,
xenophobic, narrow-minded, inflexible. But they were not always so; in the 1920s and 1930s,
these magazines sought to understand how new literature might be understood in relation to
official culture. Sometimes, this meant criticism. Sometimes, it meant a careful attempt to think
through how the concept of modernism might, in time, become a part of the institution of art.
For Bürger and others, this institutionalization was a failure of the avant-garde. For these
magazines, and for this thesis, it was not necessarily a tragedy.
*
Two crucial questions remain. How might such an institutionalizing process operate?
How might the concept of modernism thus emerge? This first question essentially asks how one
should approach reading a periodical, in order to think about the way in which it interacted
with modernism. Scholarship on nineteenth-century periodicals has long recognized the
potential power of Mikhail Bakhtin’s work on dialogism and heteroglossia for the study of
magazines.78 Cynthia L. Bandish’s 2001 essay on Bakhtin and Belgravia magazine opens by
noting the similarity between Margaret Beetham’s work on ‘open’ and ‘closed’ elements of the
periodical as genre, and Bakhtin’s centrifugal and centripetal forces in dialogic texts. Beetham’s
arguments are particularly relevant to the weekly review, as a form of periodical that was
reliable and regular rather than idiosyncratic and short-lived. For Beetham, periodicals are
both open and closed. Open, for the periodical ‘resists closure because it comes out over time
and is, in that respect, serial rather than endstopped. Its boundaries are fluid and its mixes
genres and authorial voices; all this in a time-extended form seems to encourage readers to
78 Introducing a 1989 special issue of Victorian Periodicals Review on ‘Critical Theory and Periodical Research’,
Laurel Brake and Anne Humpherys note that Bakhtin’s theories could be extremely useful, but have not been
taken up by the contributors. See Laurel Brake and Anne Humpherys, ‘Critical Theory and Periodical Research’,
Victorian Periodicals Review, 22 (1989), 94-95 (p. 94).
MAKING UP MODERNISM
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produce their own readings.’ Closed, because ‘Each number of the periodical is a self-contained
text and will contain sub-texts which are end-stopped or marked by closure. And each
periodical positions its readers in terms which construct for that reader a recognisable self’.79
From this perspective, Bandish argues that Bakhtin ‘describes the centripetal (closed)
forces of language as those that work towards “verbal-ideological centralization and
unification”, while the centrifugal (open) forces stratify language into a kind of “social and
historical heteroglossia” where heteroglossia recognizes each language utterance as part of a
multitude of languages informed by the values of various languages’.80 Bandish thus moves to
read Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s periodical Belgravia at two related but distinct levels.
Within a specific issue, we have dialogism operating between the individual entries, and over the
course of a specific editorship, we will find dialogism operating at the level of metanarrative as
groups of entries reflect patterns of temperament and shared assumptions about Victorian
society.81
This attention to different forms of dialogism is extremely useful, but it runs the risk of passing
over the possibility for individual texts to have a relationship with the periodical’s metanarrative.
Individual writers knew that they were writing for the Spectator rather than for, say, the Criterion:
this knowledge surely had the potential to alter their texts.
I read the importance of Bakhtin’s dialogism for periodicals in a slightly different way.
Bakhtin’s argument about the novel is that the disunified properties of language are structured.
heterogenous stylistic unities, upon entering the novel, combine to form a structured artistic system,
and are subordinated to the higher stylistic unity of the work as a whole, a unity that cannot be
identified with any single one of the unities subordinated to it. (p. 276)
Crucially, Bakhtin suggests that utter disunity is prevented not by an overt attempt at control
(as in language), but by a structured ‘stylistic unity’ that admits and even depends on the
acknowledged disunity and dissonance of heterogenous elements. For mainstream periodicals, I
79 Margaret Beetham, ‘Towards a Theory of the Periodical as a Publishing Genre’, in Investigating Victorian
Journalism, ed. by Laurel Brake, Aled Jones and Lionel Madden (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1990), pp. 19-32 (p. 29).
80 Cynthia L. Bandish, ‘Bakhtin's Dialogism and the Bohemian Meta-Narrative of “Belgravia”: A Case Study for
Analyzing Periodicals’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 34 (2001), 239-62 (p. 240). Bandish is quoting from Bakhtin’s
essay ‘Discourse and the Novel’; see Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. by Michael
Holquist, trans. by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 272. Further
references to this essay are given in the text.
81 Bandish, ‘Bakhtin's Dialogism’, p. 242.
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consider Bakhtin’s concept of a structured system particularly powerful; under this model,
heterogenous articles are structured in their relationship to the magazine as a whole. That
whole, as I have argued, is flooded with a sense of serious purpose, and a need to uphold the
institution of art. While one might legitimately talk about the metanarrative of the periodical as
invested in this defence of official culture, and then about dialogism within individual issues, it is
important to recognize that individual elements could have a relationship with the wider
institutional structure of the periodical.
Bakhtin goes on to develop heteroglossia to discuss external and internal dialogism at
the level of the word:
The word, directed towards its object, enters a dialogically agitated and tension-filled environment
of alien words, value judgments and accents, weaves in and out of complex interrelationships,
merges with some, recoils from others, intersects with yet a third group: and all this may crucially
shape discourse, may leave a trace in all its semantic layers, may complicate its expression and
influence its entire stylistic profile. (p. 276)
I read this dynamic extended metaphor as a way to think about discussions of modern literature
in mainstream weekly magazines. The serious nature of these periodicals creates an
overarching stylistic unity under which these texts appear: periodical texts are never published
in isolation. In this highly metaphorical sense, the modernist ‘word’ might include the
publication of a modernist text, the review of a modernist text, or even just the mention of the
concept of modernism in an editorial or review. These brief, illuminating moments in a
periodical’s overall structure are those that ‘shape discourse’ and ‘leave a trace’. These
mainstream periodicals should be read as open, dialogic institutions, governed by an overall
cultural seriousness but finding space within that identity to discuss new literature.
Note, also, that Bakhtin’s image of the word in a ‘dialogically agitated’ environment is
truly dynamic. To pursue the metaphor, it does not simply battle towards its object but is
shaped by the dialogic, heteroglossic motion it undergoes. The process of exploring
representations of modernism in these magazines is not a matter of excavating the first
moments where that which we know as modernism is clearly visible. Rather, the concept of
modernism was never static; the reality is more complex. The authoritative, evaluative role that
MAKING UP MODERNISM
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these magazines take on is not neutral; they do not simply perceive modernism and choose to
recognize it as legitimate. Instead, I contend that as weekly reviews evaluate modernism for a
mainstream audience, they bring the concept of modernism itself into public being.
This contention is rooted in philosopher Ian Hacking’s work on a phenomenon that he
calls ‘making up people’. His work deserves extended attention, as its relevance to the study of
modernism is not immediately apparent. Hacking begins his essay ‘Making Up People’ by
asking a question: ‘Were there any perverts before the late nineteenth century?’.82 The answer
he takes from Arnold Davidson is no, there were not: ‘perversion as a disease, and the pervert,
as a diseased person, were created in the late nineteenth century’ (p. 100). Hacking’s concern is
largely with kinds of people, particularly diagnostic kinds—he also writes about multiple
personality disorder—but he goes on to discuss the philosophical consequences of making up
people, and a theory he calls ‘dynamic nominalism’ (p. 100). Hacking sees this as a way to
transcend the nominalist/realist debate in philosophy.
A traditional nominalist says that stars (or algae, or justice) have nothing in common with others of
their kind except our names for them (‘stars’, ‘algae’, ‘justice’). The traditional realist in contrast
finds it amazing that the world could so kindly sort itself into our categories. He protests that there
are definite sorts of objects in it, at least stars and algae, which we have painstakingly come to
recognize and classify correctly. (p. 104)
Perry Anderson’s famous argument (discussed above) about the emptiness of modernism as
category might be described as classically nominalist in this fashion: modernist texts understood
as sharing our labels for them, rather than underlying characteristics. On the other hand, what
Hacking perceives as a realist argument might argue that modernist texts shared certain
inalienable properties, which the wider public eventually recognized and named. Neither are
fully satisfactory, and Hacking suggests an alternative.
A different kind of nominalism—I call it dynamic nominalism—attracts my realist self. […] The
claim of dynamic nominalism is not that there was a kind of person who came increasingly to be
recognized by bureaucrats or by students of human nature, but rather that a kind of person came
into being at the same time as the kind itself was being invented. In some cases, that is, our
classifications and our classes conspire to emerge hand in hand, each egging the other on. (p. 106)
82 Ian Hacking, Historical Ontology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 99. Further references to the
essay ‘Making Up People’ are given in the text.
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This is a radical claim, and the bluntness of Hacking’s title is apparent: as medical categories
were proposed, people were made up to meet them.
As I explore a concept, rather than a kind of person, my use of Hacking’s dynamic
nominalism—making up modernism, if you will—is necessarily idiosyncratic. But I find
Hacking’s work particularly rich because it provides a model for the study of the historicized
concept of modernism, gradually taking public form. It is now quite clear that modernist
literatures have complex intellectual and aesthetic roots that stretch back to the nineteenth
century. It is equally clear that fully stable, critically orthodox conceptions of modernism—
however problematic the nature of those conceptions might now be—were not available to
literary critics until mid-century.
This history charts what happened in between these two points. I use Hacking’s
dynamic nominalism to emphasize that when journalists and editors of weekly reviews wrote
about new literature, they brought the concept of modernism into public being. Weekly reviews
are not there to be mined for examples of prescient reviewers praising literature now recognised
as modernist. Rather, the intellectual conversation of these journals should be closely examined
to see how, across the period covered by this thesis, the recognized, public possibilities for being
modern shifted and altered, and it became possible for literature to be understood as modernist.
This is not a history that attempts to explain why or how modernist texts took the forms that
they did, or to recreate the intense intellectual ferment of particular little magazines, valuable as
both of those endeavours are. It is an argument fascinated by magazines too often deemed dull
and serious, and convinced of their significance, concerned with how the concept of modernism
came to be.
*
This thesis is structured by magazine, chronologically, and thematically. Each chapter
begins with a moment of significant change: the founding of a magazine, the appointment of a
new editor, or a change of ownership. The short time periods covered overlap, and run
MAKING UP MODERNISM
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chronologically. Each chapter follows a particular argumentative thread, in order to contribute
to the wider study of modernism’s emergence into public culture.
These short time periods also permit a close focus, as these magazines produced a huge
amount of material. Each issue of the Spectator was thirty-two pages in length; at fifty-two issues
a year, this amounts to 1664 pages to study. A five-year span thus consists of 8320 pages, not
including any supplements that the magazine might have printed. Many of these pages consist
of political material, and are largely irrelevant to this study, but these magazines remain a huge
and dense archive of text. My intention throughout these chapters has been to focus attention
on key texts within these magazines, and thus to avoid overwhelming the reader with a mass of
quotations.
This being said, it should be acknowledged that this is not the only methodological
approach possible with these magazines. It would be perfectly possible, for instance, to focus on
one particular short historical span, and consider all five periodicals within that; or, to group
periodicals in a pair and a three, and cover two historical spans. Alternatively, one could have
constructed chapters that traced responses to particular texts or writers, across all five
periodicals. However, the approach chosen here permits the thesis to cover a wider historical
period than that of the first two alternatives, which gives a fuller sense of a shifting relationship
between mainstream periodicals and modernism across the 1920s and 1930s. Due to the sheer
volume of material produced by these magazines, it would never be practical to study all five
magazines across eighteen years. Furthermore, dedicating each chapter to a particular
magazine allows a more careful examination of the institutional character of that magazine
than would be possible with a methodology oriented entirely around key texts or writers. As I
go on to argue, understanding these magazines as cultural institutions is often crucial to
analysing their relationship with modernism; as critically neglected periodicals, they are also, of
course, worthy of study in their own right.
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Chapter 1 covers Time and Tide from its inception in 1920 to 1926. This periodical was
run by a group of newly enfranchised women as an openly feminist alternative to the more
established weeklies such as the Spectator. Interrogating the act of starting a weekly in post-war
London, this chapter explores the character of a weekly review in great depth, discussing book
reviews as an everyday form of Francis Mulhern’s metacultural analysis. Reinforcing the
argument that these magazines stood behind cultural authority, in the early 1920s Time and Tide
was largely uncharitable towards modernism. Yet its reviews must still be taken into account
when considering the emergence of the concept of modernism. Finally, I look closely at three
quite unusual reviews of D. H. Lawrence, to emphasize how unclear modernism’s cultural role
was at this point in history.
Chapter 2 covers the Nation and Athenaeum from 1923 to 1930. The periodical was
purchased by J. M. Keynes in 1923, who soon appointed his friend Leonard Woolf as literary
editor. This chapter follows the eight years of Woolf’s editorship. Due to the Nation and
Athenaeum’s association with prominent members of Bloomsbury, one might expect the paper to
be an ideal location for emerging modernist thought. While this is true to an extent, and
important moments including Virginia Woolf’s ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ are discussed, I
argue that the Nation and Athenaeum was not a periodical driven to promote modernism,
masquerading as a weekly review. In fact, Leonard Woolf defended the independence of the
literary pages but disliked his job, and I use concepts of spatial practice to model the Nation and
Athenaeum in this context of editorial disinterest.
Chapter 3 covers the Spectator under Evelyn Wrench, 1925-32. The Spectator—founded
in 1828—is by far the longest running of the magazines studied here. It sits at the centre of the
thesis: I argue that this magazine has a particularly strong and stable sense of its own identity as
a venerable, prestigious institution of the British periodical marketplace, an identity that heavily
influences the other magazines studied. The Spectator’s identity can be explored as a form of
conservative ideology, and I use political theorists of conservatism to discuss how this periodical
MAKING UP MODERNISM
41
regards modernism in the late twenties. The Spectator does not entirely dismiss modernism, but
instead attempts to portray new literature in a way that is acceptable to its own ideology.
Sometimes, this produces unusual visions of modernism, sometimes idiosyncratic failures.
Chapter 4 covers a short period in the early history of the Listener, 1931 to 1933. This
was the BBC’s own weekly magazine—containing edited transcripts of broadcast talks—and it
proved controversial. The Listener was composed under restrictions, permitted to include only a
limited amount of material not directly based on broadcasts. This chapter has a particularly
close focus, and considers a subsection of that material: poetry and reviews of poetry published
in the Listener. It opens as the Listener begins to publish new poetry, in early 1931. This poetry
was intertwined with the career of the young literary editor, Janet Adam Smith, who was
dedicated to publishing the poetry of W. H. Auden and his contemporaries. Her work
culminated in an extraordinary poetry supplement in July 1933, featuring Auden’s ‘The
Witnesses’, eight other poems and woodcuts by Gwen Raverat. This chapter brings this
publication to light. At the same time, however, Smith’s quite radical act raises pertinent
questions concerning the limits of the weekly review as periodical form, and the ways in which
it can—and cannot—play host to new modernist literature.
Chapter 5 covers the first years of the New Statesman under a new editor, Kingsley
Martin. It runs from 1931 to 1937, and considers the question of modernism’s emergence and
canonisation. At this point, there are certainly indicators that modernist has passed into critical
orthodoxy. However, the status of modernism in public culture is not quite this simply: its
canonisation is always unclear and unstable. I consider different ways in which this magazine
nervously tests the canonical status of modernism, ending with an extended consideration of a
largely neglected piece of late prose by James Joyce, ‘From a Banned Writer to a Banned
Singer’. This final chapter is an explicit attempt to destabilize the potential of an overly neat
ending to this thesis, and raises questions pushed further in the short conclusion.
42
1. TIME AND TIDE, 1920-26
In the very first issue of Time and Tide, on 14 May 1920, Rebecca West wrote a theatre column
on J. M. Barrie’s new play Mary Rose. She dismissed it as ‘a bad play, atrociously produced, and
inappropriately acted’, and offered thoughts on the future of the theatre that look forward not
only to the new promise of this new magazine, but to the wider task faced by this thesis.
A tremendous responsibility now rests upon the theatre audience. The war has put all the other
arts on short commons for an indefinite period. Literature is not going to have the free field it has
had for the last century until we discover the way to make paper out of tropical grasses instead of
wood-pulp, and almost every picture gallery in London is on the verge of bankruptcy. But though
people will not pay money to read books or look at pictures, they do not mind paying it to go to the
theatre or the cinema. Now we need not consider the cinema at present as an art. It is in the
process of becoming an art, but it is still in the stage of working out its limitations and its
possibilities, and this process is likely to be prolonged by a certain regrettable disability. At a
cinema there is nobody at whom one can throw things. […] The future of art then will lie, to a far
greater extent than it has done for centuries, with the theatre. The writer who would otherwise
have written novels will probably, as he finds it impossible to get his first novel accepted, turn to
writing plays. Now this is, in any case, regrettable, because the novel is an infinitely richer and
more flexible art-form than the modern play, which has the cardinal disadvantage of being too
short to allow the author to work out any complex theme. It is true that Shaw and Ibsen override
this disadvantage, but an art-form that needs a Shaw and an Ibsen to tackle it is not for the average
writer. It is indeed a most ominous thing about the play that the few great playwrights are so very
great, that the only people who would have surmounted its limitations are people would have
surmounted any limitations and could have made their gospel clear, if the need had arisen, in
Limericks.1
In retrospect, of course, this cannot be taken seriously: paper prices did not kill the novel, and
West’s analysis serves as a reminder of the importance of not taking contemporary critics to task
for their lack of foresight. Indeed, one wonders how much of this analysis may be intended to
be humorous; when West criticizes the cinema for preventing the audience from throwing
‘things’ at the actors, it is entirely plausible that her tongue is firmly in her cheek.
The most important thing that emerges from this analysis is an absence. The ‘future of
art’ may lie with the theatre, but it lies with the theatre not because of the particular possibilities
of the theatrical medium—if anything, West is downbeat about the theatre’s inherent virtues—
1 Rebecca West, ‘The Theatre: “Mary Rose”’, Time and Tide, 14 May 1920, pp. 10-11 (p. 10). Barrie’s play is a
ghost story, concerning the titular character’s mysterious disappearance from and reappearance years later on a
remote island in the Hebrides.
TIME AND TIDE, 1920-26
43
but because of irresolvable problems in other art forms. Furthermore, West offers no model for
what the future of art will look like, other than the prospect that it will be somehow theatrical.
Where, then, is modernism? West, of course, wrote for the Freewoman and its successors
the New Freewoman and the Egoist, was literary editor of the Egoist for a time, and printed a short
story in the first number of BLAST.2 She was, in other words, entangled in British modernist
little magazines, and it is difficult to believe that she was entirely unaware of new literature. But
the force of her uncertainty is compelling, even if it is somewhat performed. West reviews a new
play, dislikes it, muses on the future of art, and fails to elicit any clear conclusions. That future is
complex and unclear. If this thesis attempts to trace modernism’s emergence into public being,
it must first be acknowledged that, for Time and Tide in 1920, modernism could not be clearly
perceived. This is not to say, of course, that modernist texts could not be read: to take merely
one example linked to West, The Egoist had been printing excerpts of Joyce’s Ulysses. But for a
weekly review—even in the criticism of a writer like West, clearly knowledgeable about
experimental art—the wider conceptualization of modernism as literary movement was not yet
possible.
This chapter will develop two principal lines of inquiry. First, the fact that Time and Tide
was a new magazine in 1920 demands attention, and offers a rare opportunity to inspect the
genre of the weekly review, as a new magazine imagines itself into being as a member of a pre-
existing class. This is, to a certain extent, a slight turn away from modernism, and the questions
raised by Rebecca West’s review of Mary Rose therefore still stand: where, for Time and Tide, is
modernism? I trace the concept as it is glimpsed in reviews of new poetry, Virginia Woolf, and
D. H. Lawrence, among other texts. Many of these glimpses dismiss modernism as a short-lived
fad, but it should be considered that in such brief moments of recognition one can locate
modernism’s position in public culture in the 1920s: unclear, but emerging gradually into
public life with each fragmented, sceptical glance. On the other hand, following West’s review,
2 See The Young Rebecca: Writings of Rebecca West 1911-17, ed. by Jane Marcus (New York: The Viking Press, 1982).
TIME AND TIDE, 1920-26
44
the absence of a clear perspective on modernism signifies. Modernism may locate its origins in
the nineteenth century, but in the early 1920s, at least, Time and Tide remained ambivalent
about its place in public culture.
In May 1920, then, Time and Tide was both brand new and unusual. It discussed these
facts in an editorial in its first issue.
That the group behind this paper is composed entirely of women has already been frequently
commented on. It would be possible to lay too much stress upon the fact. The binding link
between these people is not primarily their common sex. On the other hand, this fact is not
without its significance. Amongst those to whom the need we have spoken of is apparent to-day are
a very large number of women. Women have newly come into the larger world, and are indeed
themselves to some extent answerable for that loosening of party and sectarian ties which is so
marked a feature of the present day. It is therefore natural that just now many of them should tend
to be especially conscious of the need for an independent Press, owing allegiance to no sect or
party.3
The weekly reviews were overwhelmingly male dominated. Female journalists did of course
write for these papers—Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, Stella Benson, to take just three
examples—but they were only rarely found in stable positions. A very few had regular
columns—Iris Barry wrote one of the first film columns for the Spectator—but they were not
editors. As Jayne Marek in particular has argued, women played hugely important roles in
editing some of the most important little magazines, but the same was not true for the weekly
reviews.4 Outside of Time and Tide, one might point to Janet Adam Smith, whose career at the
Listener is discussed in Chapter 4, or the Saturday Review (not a periodical covered by this thesis),
which was owned in its very last years by the ‘eccentric heiress’—and Fascist sympathizer—
Lucy, Lady Houston.5
Time and Tide, then, was truly revolutionary, and should be remembered as such
irrespective of its relationship with modernist literature. It is likely due to this fact that of the
magazines covered by this thesis Time and Tide has received the lion’s share of critical attention.
Dale Spender’s 1984 anthology of Time and Tide articles attempted to recover a sense of women
3 ‘Time and Tide’, Time and Tide, 14 May 1920, p. 4.
4 Jayne E. Marek, Women Editing Modernism: ‘Little’ Magazines & Literary History (Lexington: University Press of
Kentucky, 1995).
5 Kerry Powell, ‘Saturday Review, The’, in British Literary Magazines: The Victorian and Edwardian Age, 1837-1913, ed.
by Alvin Sullivan (New York: Greenwood, 1984), pp. 379-83 (p. 382).
TIME AND TIDE, 1920-26
45
working together in a moment of historical optimism: public feminism after the vote was
(partially) won.6 Her arguments have been developed by Michelle Tusan’s more recent work in
feminist periodical studies.7 Muriel Mellown has argued for the importance of the magazine as
literary review in the late twenties and thirties, particularly in publishing female writers and
ethnic minorities.8 As previously mentioned, Time and Tide is the only magazine covered here to
appear in the Brooker and Thacker volumes: Jane Dowson writes on this weekly and the
Bermondsey Book, a quarterly, and discusses the potential of a counter-public sphere.9 But it is
Catherine Clay’s recent and ongoing work on this magazine that has brought Time and Tide
closer to the critical limelight, and her work forms a crucial backdrop to my focus in this
chapter. Clay traces the development of the magazine’s identity in the late twenties and thirties,
locating a ‘literary turn’ in October 1928. In a clear alteration of its periodical codes, Time and
Tide expanded from 24 to 32 pages, used the extra space largely for book reviews, and began to
include more publishers in its advertising material.10
This chapter looks at the periodical’s first years, from 1920 to 1926, under two editors
(Vera Laughton and Helen Archdale), before Clay’s ‘literary turn’. While I have suggested that
the place of modernism in the cultural landscape of Britain in 1920 was unclear, a text in only
the second issue of Time and Tide appears to be precisely what this history has been searching for.
In this curious, whimsical essay, named ‘Two-Eyes’, novelist Clemence Dane assesses current
and past novelists and poets and divides them into three types, ‘the products of the age, the
6 Dale Spender, Time and Tide Wait For No Man (London: Pandora Press, 1984).
7 Michelle Elizabeth Tusan, Women Making News: Gender and Journalism in Modern Britain (Chicago: University of
Illinois Press, 2005).
8 Muriel Mellown, ‘Time and Tide’, in British Literary Magazines, vol. 4: The Modern Age, 1914-1984, ed. by Alvin
Sullivan (New York: Greenwood, 1983), pp. 441-52; Muriel Mellown, ‘Rhondda and the Changing Faces of
British Feminism’, Frontiers - a Journal of Women Studies, 9 (1987), 7-13.
9 Jane Dowson, ‘Interventions in the Public Sphere: Time and Tide (1920-30) and The Bermondsey Book (1923-30)’, in
The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: Volume I, Britain and Ireland 1880-1955, ed. by Peter
Brooker and Andrew Thacker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 530-51.
10 Catherine Clay, ‘“WHAT WE MIGHT EXPECT - If the Highbrow Weeklies Advertized like the Patent
Foods”: Time and Tide, Advertising, and the “Battle of the Brows”’, Modernist Cultures, 6 (2011), 60-95 (pp. 60-61, 75).
Clay has written widely on Time and Tide and the network of writers connected with the magazine, and her work is
discussed throughout this chapter. Her history of Time and Tide is forthcoming.
TIME AND TIDE, 1920-26
46
products of the age (to come), and the ageless, the pure artists.’11 Both a serious attempt at
classification and gently comedic, it immediately undercuts its own legitimacy.
To your true story-lover, literature is a jig-saw puzzle, and the picture to be made a ladder of fame.
On each rung there is room for just one author and the fun, of course, lies in fitting favourite
authors into their proper places. Unfortunately the story-lover always calls in another story-lover to
help him, and the rest is confusion; for where the one puts Cinderella above Red-Ridinghood, the other
puts Red-Ridinghood above Cinderella: and when they call in an umpire he decides in favour of—
Sleeping Beauty! Still, it’s a delightful game, and who hasn’t played it?12
Dane’s tone modulates towards seriousness as she suggests that in order to ‘criticise, to
appreciate the writers of our age […] they must be divided into at least three classes or
processions, each following a different group of leaders’. She then immediately reintroduces the
whimsical element by linking her groups to characters from a Grimm fairy tale.
Dane’s three types are broadly hierarchical: One-eye is ‘the ever increasing herd of
writers whose genius is […] receptive rather than creative’. The category includes Joyce,
Wyndham Lewis, and Dorothy Richardson, as well as now lesser-known writers: J. D.
Beresford, Gilbert Cannan and W. P. Barbellion.13 Three-eyes, the true artist, includes much of
the established canon of English literature, alongside Conrad, Bennett, and Henry James,
among others. Two-eyes, the final classification, is ‘the man with the message’: H. G. Wells, but
especially John Galsworthy.14 Almost a full third of the article is taken up with detailed praise of
Galsworthy’s work.
If nothing else, Dane’s article knowingly demonstrates the humorous folly of attempting
to impose strict classification on emergent concepts of literature. There is some form of
recognized connection between Joyce, Lewis and Richardson, although it is not praised. Even
though the piece itself is humorous, the rejection of Joyce, Lewis and Richardson should be
taken seriously. It is not even possible to say that Dane turns against modernism: her rejection is
11 Clemence Dane, ‘“Two-Eyes”’, Time and Tide, 21 May 1920, pp. 32-34 (p. 32). Clemence Dane was the
pseudonym of Winifred Ashton (1888-1965), a novelist, playwright and screenwriter. See Jenny Hartley, ‘Dane,
Clemence’, in Encyclopedia of British Women's Writing, 1900-1950, ed. by Faye Hammill, Esme Miskimmin and Ashlie
Sponenberg (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 63-64.
12 Dane, ‘“Two-Eyes”’, p. 32.
13 Dane, ‘“Two-Eyes”’, p. 32.
14 Dane, ‘“Two-Eyes”’, p. 33.
TIME AND TIDE, 1920-26
47
more complete than this, as she denies that modernism should be accorded any status
whatsoever. A ‘One-eye’ writer is entirely ordinary.
He is the Gradgrind of literature—fact, fact, fact, is his concern. And with bewildering, worker-bee
industry he does gather and present to us, under cover of a novel, invaluable assortments of facts
concerning himself and the effects upon himself of the universe; but he does not attempt
arrangement or selection, nor does he deduce from his facts any theory, propound any panacea.
He neither points his moral nor adorns his tale. He chronicles what his one eye has achieved and
conceives that his work is done.15
This implies that the problem faced when reading Time and Tide at the start of the 1920s is not
simply one of modernism viewed of as avant-garde, but of modernism not viewed at all. Any
analysis of representations of modernism in Time and Tide is fraught with difficulty and
confusion. Yet as promised in the introduction, modernism’s ghostly absence is sometimes as
historically significant as its presence. Time and Tide has much to tell.
*
Time and Tide was founded in 1920: why did a group of politically active women choose
to start a weekly review at this point in history? More pertinently, why a weekly review, rather
than another magazine? What, in other words, can the origins of Time and Tide reveal about the
genre of the weekly review? In the introduction, I offered some general and contextual analysis
on this particular type of periodical; here, I hope to go into greater depth. A focus on Time and
Tide reveals three related characteristics that recur throughout this thesis. First, the weekly
review may be associated with the political and social establishment, but also proves
ideologically flexible. Second, while this study considers the literary material, it is abundantly
clear that this is a primarily political form. Cultural material tended to play second fiddle. Third,
it is useful to understand a magazine of this nature as producing a profoundly everyday form of
cultural analysis. These will be considered in turn, but it should also be emphasised that they
are closely related, and bleed into each other as they make up the image of the weekly review
that Rhondda and her collaborators imagined when they began a new magazine in May 1920.
15 Dane, ‘“Two-Eyes”’, p. 32.
TIME AND TIDE, 1920-26
48
The notion of seriousness as a central component of the sixpenny review, and from this
their defence of the institution of art, was proposed in the introduction. With Time and Tide, this
association with authority and institutionality is also clear in social and political terms. That
editorial quoted above notes that ‘women have newly come into the larger world’, and the key
historical context for Time and Tide’s publication was the partial enfranchisement of women in
February 1918. In 1920, women over thirty were ‘newly’ able to vote; in 1928, they would gain
enfranchisement on equal terms with men. Yet Time and Tide, despite being ‘composed entirely
of women’, seeks to manage the way in which its readership interprets this information. It
hesitates between trumpeting the energetic modernity of its staff, arguing that women are
somehow uniquely placed to work as journalists in the new post-war environment, and
reassuring the reader that such a staff makes it little different from any other weekly review. In
fact, writing a weekly review did represent a clear turn away from the more openly radical
political journalism that the magazine’s founders and editors had been involved in before and
during the war. Both of Time and Tide’s early editors had been involved in pre-enfranchisement
suffrage journalism. Vera Laughton, editor from 1920 to 1922, had joined the militant
Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) at a young age, and edited the paper Suffragette in
the war.16 Helen Archdale joined the WSPU in 1908 and was convicted multiple times of
public disturbances. She went on hunger strike in 1909 and in 1911 was in Holloway prison for
two months. Later, she was sub-editor and occasionally printer at the Suffragette.17 Rhondda was
a fellow member of the WSPU, was briefly imprisoned in 1913, and was a frequent contributor
to Votes for Women.18
16 Elizabeth Crawford, The Women's Suffrage Movement: a Reference Guide, 1866-1928 (London: UCL Press, 1999), pp.
1093-94. Laughton suggests in a memoir that her career at Time and Tide ended so quickly because of her
commitment to the Wrens Association for veterans of the Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS). She would later
rise to command the WRNS when it was re-established in 1939. See Vera Laughton Mathews, Blue Tapestry
(London: Hollis & Carter, 1948), p. 28.
17 Crawford, Women's Suffrage Movement, pp. 69-70.
18 Crawford, Women's Suffrage Movement, pp. 1655-56; Shirley M. Eoff, Viscountess Rhondda: Equalitarian Feminist
(Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1991), pp. 19-34.
TIME AND TIDE, 1920-26
49
Indeed, there is a clear sense that the weekly review was an appropriate format for
politically active women who were formally and legally a part of the body politic. Michelle
Tusan describes this format as one that ‘enjoy[ed] widespread respect among both supporters
and detractors and commanded real influence over British political culture’.19 Indeed, one of
Time and Tide’s principal activities was to set up and report on the ‘Six Point Group’, a lobby
group which campaigned for reform on six specific points relevant to women.20 These causes
may have been radical, to varying degrees, but they are all understood through the lens of legal
reform.
Time and Tide’s presentation of itself in its first editorial as safe and non-threatening
despite female governance, together with its drive for legal reform, might thus be understood
under what Adrian Bingham describes as ‘a broad consensus’ among gender historians of the
1980s and 1990s, that ‘the acquisition of the vote and the various legal reforms in the decade
after 1918 did not fundamentally transform the position of women’, and that a post-war
‘backlash’ meant that ‘the women’s movement […] splintered, and was unable to recapture
mass support or to challenge effectively the conservative gender discourses that were becoming
dominant.’21 Time and Tide, then, is indicative of a step back from vigorous campaigning, and a
less confrontational attempt to work within the clearly patriarchal world of Westminster politics
and the sixpenny weeklies. From the perspective of the weekly review, the genre is thus
understood as a part of the establishment: one signs up to it and foregoes any chance at
radicalism.
However, this fails to fully account for the complexities within the opening editorial:
while Time and Tide does in certain ways hold its all-female nature at arms length, it does argue
quite strongly that the female journalists working for it are somehow an indicator of its own
19 Tusan, Women Making News, p. 211.
20 The Six Points were legislation on child assault; legislation protecting widowed mothers; legislation protecting
unmarried mothers and children; equal rights of guardianship for married parents; equal pay for teachers; equal
opportunities in the civil service. For the original announcement, see ‘A Programme’, Time and Tide, 21 January
1921, p. 52.
21 Adrian Bingham, ‘“An Era of Domesticity”? Histories of Women and Gender in Interwar Britain’, Cultural and
Social History, 1 (2004), 225-33 (p. 225).
TIME AND TIDE, 1920-26
50
vital modernity. Journalists and activists like Laughton, Archdale and Rhondda certainly
moved to a periodical form more comfortable in the political establishment, but this should not
necessarily represent a disavowal of their previous views. Broadly speaking, feminist history in
recent years is less concerned with tracing the legislative successes and failures of feminism, and
more with the idea that ‘after 1918 women sought to assert their citizenship within the
profoundly inhospitable political culture to which they had just been admitted’.22 Michelle
Tusan argues that periodicals, both as a part of the suffrage campaign and in the post-suffrage
world, were a crucial way for women to participate in public life and create a gendered, activist
community.23 Time and Tide thus transformed women’s journalism from a space for radical
advocacy into ‘an arena of intellectual public discourse for the newly enfranchised female
reader’.24 Dowson makes the more ambitious claim that Time and Tide ‘went on to enact the
ideal of an egalitarian communicating public’.25
While the weekly review might indeed offer the ideal periodical form for such an ‘arena’,
there are again antecedents in pre-war journalism. As Maria DiCenzo, Lucy Delap and Leila
Ryan argue, pre-enfranchisement female political activism was not limited to suffrage
campaigns in the early twentieth century, and even that suffrage movement ‘served as a vehicle
for much more than the struggle for enfranchisement.’26 Furthermore, continuities should still
be acknowledged between Time and Tide and previous feminist periodicals. In 1926, Rebecca
West wrote for Time and Tide what must surely have been the first ever retrospective of the
radical impression made by Dora Marsden’s Freewoman.27 West argues explicitly that the ‘quiet
orthodox women’s weekly’ Time and Tide makes arguments about women, normalized by 1926,
22 Pat Thane, ‘What Difference Did the Vote Make?’, in Women, Privilege, and Power: British Politics, 1750 to the Present,
ed. by Amanda Vickery (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), pp. 253-88 (p. 288).
23 Tusan, Women Making News, p. 2.
24 Tusan, Women Making News, p. 220.
25 Dowson, ‘Interventions in the Public Sphere’, p. 534.
26 Maria DiCenzo, Lucy Delap and Leila Ryan, Feminist Media History: Suffrage, Periodicals and the Public Sphere
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 13.
27 On the Freewoman, see Jean-Michel Rabaté, ‘Gender and Modernism: The Freewoman (1911-12), The New
Freewoman (1913) and The Egoist (1914-19)’, in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: Volume I,
Britain and Ireland 1880-1955, ed. by Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009),
pp. 269-89.
TIME AND TIDE, 1920-26
51
that were first made in ‘candour’ by the Freewoman.28 On the other hand, feminist periodicals
differed widely. As Lucy Delap has argued, magazines such as the Freewoman were in favour of
suffrage, but should be distinguished from suffrage periodicals such as Votes for Women (and,
indeed, Time and Tide) by a profound commitment to political and social radicalism.29 Time and
Tide should be acknowledged as part of an alternative tradition, distinct from Delap’s political
avant-garde.30 Suffrage periodicals such as the Englishwoman were key precursors to Time and
Tide’s status as generalist political review. The Englishwoman, for instance, occupied
a peculiar position as both a ‘suffrage magazine’ and a more generalist monthly review devoted to
politics and culture. In a campaign which often struggled to defend its social inclusiveness, this
journal addressed itself unapologetically to the ‘cultured public’ and included ‘The Lady Frances
Balfour’ and Lady Strachey on its editorial committee.31
Delap, DiCenzo and Ryan note that the Englishwoman suffered a demise as new periodicals,
including Time and Tide, began publication. Read together, ‘these titles represented a persistent
attempt to provide a larger review format for debates about women’s issues from the late
nineteenth century through to the interwar years.’32
Time and Tide might therefore be a new entry into an established genre, but it has a
complex and nuanced prehistory in feminist journalism and political activism. The format of
the weekly review may have been uniform—something made very clear by the first issue of
Time and Tide—but this uniformity should not be mistaken for complete ideological inflexibility.
Rather, the monochrome, text-heavy, nearly identical front pages of these magazines (see
Appendix C) concealed a surprising level of ideological flexibility within. Though this was a
genre of periodical closely associated with political and cultural institutions, it could accept as a
new member a periodical essentially constructed from the remnants of suffrage journals, staffed
by former members of the WSPU. Time and Tide clearly had to negotiate with the conventions
of the genre to form an identity for itself, but it did not, as this recent scholarship demonstrates,
28 Rebecca West, ‘“The Freewoman”’, Time and Tide, 16 July 1926, pp. 648-49 (p. 649).
29 Lucy Delap, The Feminist Avant-Garde: Transatlantic Encounters of the Early Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2007), p. 27.
30 Delap uses the term ‘avant-garde’ in a nineteenth-century sense, to ‘describe a certain kind of revolutionary
political activism’. Delap, The Feminist Avant-Garde: Transatlantic Encounters of the Early Twentieth Century, p. 4.
31 DiCenzo, Delap and Ryan, Feminist Media History, p. 121.
32 DiCenzo, Delap and Ryan, Feminist Media History, p. 130.
TIME AND TIDE, 1920-26
52
have to disavow its prehistory altogether. As the subsequent chapters will demonstrate, weekly
reviews could rarely be described as radical, but they were complex and fascinating institutions
nonetheless; behind their covers, one finds not only Time and Tide’s feminism, but the Nation and
Athenaeum’s entanglement with Bloomsbury, the New Statesman’s publication of Joyce, and the
Listener’s promotion of W. H. Auden and his contemporaries.
While this ideological flexibility can, in this way, be linked to the discussion of literature
and culture, it must also be acknowledged that the place of literary criticism is not central to the
weekly review. The case of Time and Tide underscores the extent to which this was a genre led
by politics and political analysis, not book reviews. Consider a further passage from its opening
editorial.
Time and Tide has, in the view of its promoters, come into being to supply a definite need. The great
whirlwind which has just passed has left us standing in a new and unknown world. It follows
naturally enough that those who have served us as guides in the past are in certain directions ill
equipped to help us to understand our strange surroundings, or to supply the new needs which we
find ourselves to have acquired. This is perhaps specially true of the Press; bred for the most part in
Victorian or Edwardian days, tethered inevitably to its own past, it would often seem to find great
difficulty in interpreting the changed conditions that lie—still but half realised—around us.33
It is a necessary intervention in a new and swiftly changing world. And while statements that
refer to a ‘new and unknown world’ might easily, with hindsight, seem to pertain to literature—
this is, after all, 1920—there is little contemporary evidence that Time and Tide sensed this
interaction. Conversely, it is quite apparent that the historical moment into which Time and Tide
propelled itself was a distinctive one for literary periodicals. Discussing T. S. Eliot’s decision to
start the Criterion in 1922, Jason Harding notes ‘the demise of a number of varied and lively
“little” magazines—the Egoist in 1919, Art and Letters and Coterie in 1920, Wheels in 1921—forums
and clearing-houses for the work of London’s literary avant-garde’.34 Matthew Huculak has
argued that a new wave of magazines emerged in London, following the war and filling this gap.
Murry took over the editorship at The Athenaeum (1919-21) while D. L. Kelleher’s Aengus (Dublin,
1919), Chaman Lall’s Coterie (1919-21), Harold Monro’s The Monthly Chapbook (1919-25), Robert
33 ‘Time and Tide’.
34 Jason Harding, The Criterion: Cultural Politics and Periodical Networks in Inter-War Britain (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2002), p. 7.
TIME AND TIDE, 1920-26
53
Graves’s The Owl (1919-23), Thomas Moult’s Voices (1919-21), and N. A. Beechman’s The Oxford
Outlook (1919-32) all sprang up out of the war’s mire.35
Huculak suggests that the notion of modern literature was not dominated by ‘a monolithic
understanding of modernism as solely an avant-garde movement’. Instead, the concept of what
was modern remained firmly ‘up for grabs’.36 Yet Time and Tide is nowhere to be seen. While
the magazine certainly does deserve further critical attention, its absence from lists of this kind
is not simply an unjustified oversight. In 1921, T. S. Eliot first began to think seriously about
starting a magazine, writing to Ottoline Morrell that it ‘would be an interesting attempt just
now when there is nothing in London’.37 One could not fairly answer that Eliot was mistaken,
and that there was Time and Tide, which also claimed to fill a void. While their paths do
sometimes cross, these magazines have different absences, different modernities in mind; Time
and Tide, like almost all weekly reviews, was led by an awareness of a political modernity, rather
than a literary one.
This is not a clear-cut distinction: Time and Tide is clearly responding to a postwar world,
as does (say) The Waste Land or Jacob’s Room. Yet while these modernities are tangled up in each
other, it should also be acknowledged that, sometimes, distinctions are valid. Political and
literary motivations for starting a new magazine can lie on top of one another, responding to
similar (though not identical) stimuli, yet appear largely invisible to one another. To an extent,
this is gendered: Time and Tide’s particular awareness of political freedom and potential was
motivated by partial enfranchisement. In taking this legal shift in the spirit that Time and Tide’s
founders saw it, I am to an extent posing the same question upon which Rita Felski grounds her
interrogation of the gender of modernity.
How would our understanding of modernity change if instead of taking male experience as
paradigmatic, we were to look instead at texts written primarily by or about women? And what if
35 Matthew Huculak, ‘The London Mercury (1919-39) and Other Moderns’, in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of
Modernist Magazines: Volume I, Britain and Ireland 1880-1955, ed. by Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 241-59 (pp. 242-43).
36 Huculak, ‘The London Mercury’, p. 241.
37 The Letters of T. S. Eliot, ed. by Valerie Eliot, Hugh Haughton and John Haffenden, 5 vols to date (London: Faber
and Faber, 1988- ), I (rev. edn), 571 (Eliot to Ottoline Morrell, 14 July 1921). This idea would become the Criterion
in 1922.
TIME AND TIDE, 1920-26
54
feminine phenomena, often seen as having a secondary or marginal status, were given a central
importance in the culture of modernism? What difference would such a procedure make?38
From the point of view of the political half of Time and Tide, the difference is clear; it is less so
from the cultural side. As I discuss below, Time and Tide has been understood as an important
location for publishing women’s writing, and while this is certainly true it also seems to lack the
motivation and sheer awareness of modernity found in the political half. In other words, Time
and Tide’s identity as feminist political weekly provided it with a strong sense of its own
modernity, but also permits—or perhaps even encourages—a less well-defined identity for the
cultural half. Some of that energy is carried across the break between the political and literary
halves, but some of it is lost.
It should be clear from the small number of pieces already discussed that this thesis
tends to focus on the everyday cultural analysis found in weekly columns and editorials.
Rebecca West’s reading of Mary Rose and modern theatre was not an extraordinary event but
simply the first instalment in a regular theatre column. Modernist little magazines were very
different: when founded they tended to present themselves as an intervention or event. Not for
nothing does Eliot’s first issue of the Criterion print The Waste Land. Wyndham Lewis’s BLAST—
almost an archetype of that short-lived, avant-garde magazine—presented readers of the first
issue with the Vorticist manifesto. The Little Review was less visually provocative, but
nevertheless opened with an ‘Announcement’ that sought to emphasize the important role that
the magazine would play in appreciating and criticizing art and literature.39 Dora Marsden’s
Freewoman began the first article on its front page by questioning—and asserting—its own right
to exist.
It is a wholly pertinent matter that the temerarious persons who launch The Freewoman should be
asked, ‘Who are the Freewomen?’ Where are the women of whom and for whom you write who
are free?40
Such gestures recall Malcolm Cowley’s acid joke about little magazines.
38 Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 10.
39 ‘Announcement’, The Little Review, March 1914, pp. 1-2.
40 ‘Bondwomen’, The Freewoman: A Weekly Feminist Review, 23 November 1911, pp. 1-2 (p. 1).
TIME AND TIDE, 1920-26
55
Usually the history of a little magazine is summarized in its format. The first issue consists, let us
say, of sixty-four pages, with half tone illustrations, printed on coated paper. The second issue has
sixty-four pages, illustrated with line cuts. The third has only forty-eight pages; the fourth has
thirty-two, without illustration; the fifth never appears.41
The point that this misses, of course, is that it is entirely possible for a magazine to play an
important cultural role within those four extant issues. Fire!!, one of the key magazines of the
Harlem Renaissance, was famously limited to a single issue.42 Such magazines privilege the
event—the fiery intervention—over the everyday.
This distinction is taken from Michael Sayeau’s recent Against the Event (2013). Sayeau’s
concern is with modernist prose narrative, and considers the concept of the everyday. As he
writes, ‘the event is that which features as a fundamental change in a situation or system in
which change seems at first difficult if not impossible to imagine’.43 As Sayeau describes, the
complex relationship between the event and ‘the ground out of which it arises’—the
everyday—has preoccupied Western philosophy.44 For the sake of brevity, the ‘ground’ from
which the event arises shall here be taken simply to constitute the periodical marketplace, in
which the arrival of BLAST (for example) is very clearly an event.
Time and Tide, the weekly review, was profoundly different. Where little magazines
began by asserting their interventionalism, Time and Tide confines its editorial setting out its aims
to the fourth page—where there would be an editorial every week. The paper opens, as it
would continue to do every week, with unsigned leading articles that provide comment on the
week’s news. Thus Time and Tide did not begin with the claim that it has ‘come into being to
supply a definite need’. Rather, it began by discussing internal struggles in the Liberal party.
Last week at Leamington the two wings of the Liberal Party succeeded in bringing their differences
to a more or less definite issue in a real old-fashioned political way. And any candid critic cannot
41 Malcolm Cowley, Exile's Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s, ed. by Donald W. Faulkner (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1994), p. 188. Brooker and Thacker quote Cowley’s comment at the start of their introduction to Vol. 1.
See Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, ‘General Introduction’, in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of
Modernist Magazines: Volume I, Britain and Ireland 1880-1955, ed. by Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 1-26 (p. 1).
42 See Martha Nadell, ‘“Devoted to Younger Negro Artists”: Fire!! (1926) and Harlem (1928)’, in The Oxford Critical
and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: Volume II, North America 1894-1960, ed. by Peter Brooker and Andrew
Thacker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 801-23.
43 Michael Sayeau, Against the Event: The Everyday and the Evolution of Modernist Narrative (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2013), p. 3.
44 Sayeau, Against the Event, p. 3.
TIME AND TIDE, 1920-26
56
fail to observe that both sides are now expressing in public, some of those bitter personal
animosities which have prevailed since December 1916, and which hitherto, have only been
articulated in select and private circles. Lloyd George or Asquith? Under which leader will you
serve?45
Time and Tide essentially imagines itself into being as a periodical that will be dependable; it
should be regular, and established, by issue two. One might surmise it would choose existence
after ten years, rather than a splash in the first issue. Sayeau emphasizes the philosophical
complexity of the everyday. ‘The ordinariness of things’, as he points out, ‘is very much a
matter of the eye of the observer’.46 This salutary reminder again points out that these
magazines were associated with cultural and political authority, and stability; the world in
which Time and Tide was everyday was educated, middle-class, and London-centric.
And yet, attention to the specific form of the everyday that Time and Tide performs also
suggests the fact that, to be precise, this is not a case of everydayness, but of weeklyness. In this
context, those very first words written by Time and Tide take on a likely unintended significance.
‘Last week at Leamington…’. Last week: a week’s worth of news must take place, and the
weekly review will then and only then step in to sum up, analyse, and offer any conclusions it
might have. In 1922, Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary of reading the weeklies, always on a
Saturday. In February, ‘Within the last few minutes I have skimmed the reviews in the New
Statesman; between coffee and cigarettes I read the Nation’.47 In July, she noted that ‘We have
just had Saturday tea, at which we read the weeklies’.48 Slightly banal notices, perhaps, but that
is of course part of the point. Time and Tide establishes itself as a new magazine, but as a weekly
review it explicitly starts as it means to go on; essentially, it imagines itself into being as a
periodical that is stable and will continue.49 What, then, did this new magazine that almost
wanted to be old make of modernist literature?
45 ‘[Last Week at Leamington...]’, Time and Tide, 14 May 1920, p. 1.
46 Sayeau, Against the Event, p. 8.
47 The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. by Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie, 5 vols (London: Hogarth Press, 1977-
1984), II, 169 (18 February 1922).
48 Diary of Virginia Woolf, II, 184 (22 July 1922).
49 On a slightly related note, Time and Tide did last, and became one of the mainstays of the weekly periodicals
marketplace. There is, however, a similarly to many little magazines in the fact that, like most weekly reviews Time
and Tide was not a profitable enterprise. Most accounts concur that the magazine continually and consistently lost
TIME AND TIDE, 1920-26
57
*
Catherine Clay’s preeminent work on Time and Tide argues that this magazine turned its
back on literary modernism; as she puts it, ‘at once registering modernist discourses, and
resisting their hegemonic power, Time and Tide constructed its modern feminist identity in 1920s
periodical culture’.50 It was a periodical that ‘directs us to a number of alternative writing
traditions that lived in critical and competitive dialogue with modernist writing in this period,
and to a large number of neglected women writers in particular’.51 In a more recent essay, Clay
suggests that the periodical’s turn away from active feminism in October 1928—the ‘literary
turn’ mentioned above—was strategic. She argues that Time and Tide chose to ‘compromise its
overt identification with female and feminist cultures in order to secure its reputation for serious
political journalism’, not necessarily a rejection of feminist principles. Time and Tide’s
‘movement into a more “masculine” sphere of “high” political journalism represent[s] a
significant re-shaping of women’s identities that was consistent with its early feminist agenda’.52
This later history of Time and Tide goes beyond the scope of this chapter. In its earlier
years, however, Time and Tide is modelled as a periodical that resisted modernism in order to
promote alternatives to modernism. Clay is certainly right to emphasize the important part the
magazine played in publishing the short fiction of
many of the most popular and critically neglected women writers of this decade, including Rose
Allatini, Iris Barry, Stella Benson, Richmal Crompton, E. M. Delafield, Susan Ertz, Eleanor
Farjeon, Susan Glaspell, Winifred Holtby, Ethel Mannin, Viola Meynell, Hilda Reid, Sylvia
Thompson, Sylvia Townsend-Warner and E. H. Young.53
While actively attempting to publish women writers should of course be understood as a
political act in and of itself, it is also interesting to note that Time and Tide did sometimes attempt
to make openly feminist and political arguments with its literary pages. The very first issue
money, and was bankrolled by Rhondda’s substantial personal fortune. Muriel Mellown argues that as Rhondda
aged, she took her magazine firmly to the political right. See Mellown, ‘Time and Tide’, p. 449.
50 Catherine Clay, ‘On Not Forgetting “The Importance of Everything Else”: Feminism, Modernism and Time and
Tide (1920-1939)’, Key Words, 8 (2009), 22-37 (p. 25).
51 Clay, ‘On Not Forgetting’, p. 20.
52 Clay, ‘WHAT WE MIGHT EXPECT’, pp. 60-61; see also Clay, ‘On Not Forgetting’.
53 Clay, ‘On Not Forgetting’, pp. 25-26.
TIME AND TIDE, 1920-26
58
published a short, curious play text by Margaret MacNamara, titled ‘A New Idea’.54 It presents
itself as a politicized and socially aware text from a new and thoroughly feminist magazine. The
play features two female characters, an older woman called ‘Meeps’ and her maid, Hannah;
they argue over where and how to store the silverware. Hannah’s new ideas clash with Meeps’s
innate conservatism and resistance to innovation. The ‘new idea’ is linked explicitly to the
greater social responsibility brought on by enfranchisement.
Citizenship is the duty of every woman, whether we like votes for women or whether we don’t—
seeing as we’ve got them.55
The play is awkward and dogmatic—perhaps indicating why this idea was not repeated—yet it
does indicate that those behind Time and Tide were actively seeking a way to translate their
political feminism into literature.
Equally, Time and Tide provided employment for women to write literary journalism; as
Catherine Clay has argued, the magazine supported a network of women writers based in and
around West Hampstead, including writers such as Vera Brittain, Rebecca West, Winifred
Holtby, Storm Jameson, and Naomi Mitchison, who all appeared regularly.56 Moreover, the
way in which these critics wrote literary journalism might be understood as significant; Time and
Tide’s book reviews often analyse in an ironizing tone that implicitly (and sometimes explicitly)
defends the practice of reading for pleasure. Nicola Humble has argued convincingly that a key
tenet of the ‘feminine middlebrow novel’—her label, and not one that can be applied to the
early years under discussion here—is that such novels can be enjoyed, and are not necessarily
instructive. As she puts it, ‘the biggest social sin, in the middlebrow imagination, is that of
taking oneself too seriously’. 57 Clemence Dane’s ‘Two-Eyes’ analysis can certainly be
understood in this context. One might equally pick up Sylvia Lynd’s 1924 criticism of Rebecca
West’s defence of books that are ‘difficult to read’, and the argument that West ‘overlooks the
54 MacNamara was a playwright known for socialist and feminist views; see Patricia E. Lufkin, ‘An Analysis of the
Plays of Margaret MacNamara’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Louisiana State University, 2002).
55 Margaret MacNamara, ‘A New Idea’, Time and Tide, 14 May 1920, pp. 17-21 (p. 18).
56 Catherine Clay, British Women Writers, 1914-1945: Professional Work and Friendship (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006).
57 Nicola Humble, The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s: Class, Domesticity, and Bohemianism (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2001), p. 48.
TIME AND TIDE, 1920-26
59
first essential of story telling, which is that the attention of the reader must be captured and held
so that he shall want to read with all his might’.58 Conversely, she praises Rose Macaulay’s
Crewe Train (1926), calling it a ‘delightful book’, full of ‘wit, airy wisdom and laughter’, and
suggesting that ‘we are in the company of a writer who knows how to laugh and to make others
laugh with her’.59 Naomi Royde-Smith, novelist and literary hostess, is yet more explicit about
how one should read a book:
Most people read novels for the story. Here and there some finicking creature is to be found who is
concerned about literary quality, but these are mainly reviewers or those odd people who worry
themselves about abstractions called beauty and style.60
Royde-Smith’s tone is of course slightly mocking, given that she is in the position of the
‘finicking’ reviewer—which is of course part of the point—yet the binary she creates opposes
reading for pleasure and plot against reading for ‘beauty and style’.
Time and Tide’s role in demarcating an ‘arena’ for politically active women to discuss the
brave new world of enfranchisement was undoubtedly significant, as has already been discussed.
Additionally, the short fiction the magazine published, and the literary critics it employed,
might be seen to argue for a conception of modern literature that does not lead inevitably
towards the formal experimentation that is classically associated with modernism—and I use
the singular, rather than the plural, with deliberate care. Modernism itself, of course, is hardly
limited to just the so-called Men of 1914. At the same time, it is perhaps pertinent to point out
Glenda Norquay and Sowon Park’s argument concerning the troubling tendency within
feminist literary criticism to valorize the formal experiments of modernism.61 The modern
writing that Time and Tide did publish was new and important, even if it was rarely formally
experimental.
However, I remain wary of reading Time and Tide as a magazine that turned its back on
modernism in favour of a feminist alternative, and I must disagree with Clay’s argument that
58 Sylvia Lynd, ‘Authors at Play’, Time and Tide, 18 January 1924, pp. 56-57 (p. 56).
59 Sylvia Lynd, ‘Indiscretion and Laughter’, Time and Tide, 29 October 1926, pp. 983-84.
60 Naomi Royde-Smith, ‘Yarns’, Time and Tide, 27 November 1925, pp. 1164-65 (p. 1164).
61 Glenda Norquay and Sowon S. Park, ‘Mediating women's suffrage literature’, Women's Studies International Forum,
29 (2006), 301-06.
TIME AND TIDE, 1920-26
60
Time and Tide was ‘at once registering modernist discourses, and resisting their hegemonic
power’. Simply put, I am not convinced that modernist discourses—of any form—were
hegemonic in the 1920s, and to see Time and Tide as able to resist them is highly problematic.
Certainly, this magazine was not a bold proponent of experimental literature: weekly
reviews rarely were. The periodical’s poetry reviews—usually written by Thomas Moult—are a
case in point. Moult was himself a poet, and edited the little magazine Voices, but was perhaps
best known for issuing annual poetry anthologies of the ‘best’ poetry of the year, though his
notion of ‘best’ was quite conservative. In Time and Tide, he displays a strong antipathy towards
modernist tendencies. A 1924 review of Edna St Vincent Millay suggests that she was originally
of ‘brilliant promise’ but has now ‘travelled the world and learnt in the Latin quarters of all the
capitals what it is to be “artistic”’. She would do better, Moult suggests, to ‘forget all about “art”,
the Dadaists, and Mr James Joyce’s Ulysses’.62 In an article published a few months later, Moult
sneers at ‘the spell of the ultra-modern’.63 ‘Ultra-’ as prefix is rarely positive: it evokes a position
taken beyond what is sensible. The OED’s entry on ‘ultra-’ lists two relevant, closely related
senses: one that connotes ‘going beyond, surpassing or transcending the limits’, the other
something that is ‘excessive or extreme’.64 Consider, for example, the different connotations of
‘radical’ and ‘ultra-radical’. The former might be something that is exciting and new and even
necessary; the latter carries with it unavoidable connotations of the extreme. Crucially, though,
Moult does not reject the possibility of good modern literature, but a particular type: that which
is ‘ultra’, and goes too far in a particular direction. It is not art but ‘art’, perniciously influenced
by global travel, Dada, and Joyce.
Even if ‘ultra-modern’ is used with some nuance, Moult’s own prejudices make for
slightly uncomfortable reading; there is a faint but clearly present tang of cultural xenophobia
running through Moult’s rejection of literature found in ‘Latin quarters’ across the world.
62 Thomas Moult, ‘Poetry for Quiet People’, Time and Tide, 20 June 1924, pp. 593-94.
63 Thomas Moult, ‘Poetry: Emily Dickinson to May Sinclair’, Time and Tide, 7 November 1924, p. 1091.
64 OED, ‘ultra-, prefix’, senses 2 and 3. This entry was first published in 1921, and thus predates this use in the
Spectator.
TIME AND TIDE, 1920-26
61
However, the key point from Moult’s analysis is the extent to which it recognizes different ways
to be modern: Millay does not simply represent the new outcrop of a hegemonic, experimental
modernism, but a talented young poet who is open to various influences. What one sees here is
not Moult resisting a modernist hegemony, but evidence for Matthew Huculak’s suggestion that
the nature of modern literature was ‘up for grabs’. If Joyce and Dada were bad, Moult’s own
poetry and editorial work implicitly offered a better alternative. This work, ably explored by
Mark Morrisson, was firmly oriented towards poetry that explored the legacy of the war
without turning to the formal experimentation of modernism; in founding his little magazine
Voices, Moult ‘chose to create an institution for poetry that would draw upon already established
strategies that would connect it to the literary establishment’.65 His admonishment of Millay in
Time and Tide should not, therefore, be understood as a turn against modernism so much as a
tactical argument in a shifting, fluid debate over the proper nature of modern poetry. The
ultra-modern was not resisted because it was hegemonic, but precisely because it was not:
Moult is pitching one conception of modern literature against another.
But of course Moult’s arguments have a second consequence: in tactically delineating
differences between modern and ultra-modern poetry, Moult contributes—in an unsure and
compromised way—to a process whereby modernism begins to take on public form. Across
Time and Tide, one sees the process repeated, often in a far more even-handed manner. Sylvia
Lynd’s review of Jacob’s Room is cautiously positive, and turns outwards in order to consider how
Woolf’s fiction might differ from previous models.66
Mrs Woolf tells us no more about Jacob than the people who met him can tell us. She has given a
new kind of unity to her novel. The old way was to let one central character be the touchstone […]
for the others. That character set the standard. Good and bad were relative to him. Instead of
treating her hero in this way, Mrs Woolf presents us with a cloud of witnesses to his existence. We
65 Mark S. Morrisson, ‘The Cause of Poetry: Thomas Moult and Voices (1919-21), Harold Monro and The Monthly
Chapbook (1919-25)’, in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: Volume I, Britain and Ireland 1880-
1955, ed. by Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 405-27 (p. 416).
66 Sylvia Lynd (1888-1952) was primarily a poet, but also worked as a journalist and edited anthologies of
children’s literature. Clay notes that Lynd’s home in Hampstead with her husband, Robert, was a key location for
the ‘Friday Hampstead Circle’ of writers and publishers in the early 1930s. See Clay, British Women Writers, p. 17;
Jane Dowson, ‘Sylvia Lynd’, in Encyclopedia of British Women's Writing, ed. by Hammill, Miskimmin and Sponenberg,
p. 151. See Chapter 5 for a discussion of the Lynds’ role in the publication of Joyce’s ‘From a Banned Writer to a
Banned Singer’ in the New Statesman.
TIME AND TIDE, 1920-26
62
do not see the world only with Jacob’s eyes, but Jacob with the world’s. He is the centre of the
circle, and we look at him from all points of the circumference.67
She suggests a difference between the ‘old way’ and the ‘new kind of unity’, focusing on Woolf’s
depiction of Jacob. While Lynd’s conclusions are carefully measured, the implications she
presents are subtly radical: by opposing character as ‘touchstone’ to the ‘cloud of witnesses to
his [Jacob’s] existence’, Lynd intuitively grasps that novels like this are starting to rethink
character in fiction. To an extent, this should be seized upon as a moment where a reviewer
begins to think about the cultural significance of Woolf’s method, and the concept of
modernism thus begins to emerge. At the same time, it should be recognized that Lynd remains
(perhaps understandably) sceptical about the long-term consequences of these innovations.
Whether this scattered method of writing novels is better than the old method, I cannot say. It has
so far not been used to reveal any great or terrible moments. […] Probably in a very few years
when custom has staled it, we shall find this new method unsatisfying and turn back to the old.68
‘Method’—a term which Lynd uses twice—is an interesting choice. It does, crucially, refer
outward beyond Woolf, and suggest that she might be participating in a wider movement;
surely the important point that defines a method (rather than, say, a style) is that it is a process
that can be reproduced by more than one person. Furthermore, this ‘scattered’ method is, by
implication, new, which points towards generational change from the ‘old method’ to Woolf’s
new writing. Yet this suggestion is always tentative, and Lynd expects the ‘scattered method’ to
become ‘unsatisfying’.
Three years later, Lynd reviews Mrs Dalloway (1925), and fulfils her own prophecy.
The manner which in Jacob’s Room had the freshness of inspiration, is in danger of deteriorating
into a mannerism. […] For by this method of writing, this snatching at life in handfuls and heaping
it chaotically together, by rejecting a central presence and personality to give it order and
coherence and inevitably selection and limitation, Mrs Woolf compels us to make impossible
demands on her, and cry for every life in London in a single book. When Mrs Dalloway ceases to
be present, the reason for the presence of any of the other characters seems insufficient. […]
Septimus Warren Smith, the wretched neurotic, is a huge piece of irrelevance. […] I refuse to
accept him from Mrs Woolf as a character at all. […] I hate him for nearly spoiling delightful Mrs
Dalloway’s party.69
67 Sylvia Lynd, ‘New Novels’, Time and Tide, 24 November 1922, pp. 1136-37 (p. 1136).
68 Lynd, ‘New Novels’, p. 1137.
69 Sylvia Lynd, ‘Town and Country’, Time and Tide, 15 May 1925, p. 472.
TIME AND TIDE, 1920-26
63
‘Method’ appears yet again, but here has degenerated into something less promising, a
‘mannerism’. Curiously, Lynd’s phrases still suggest the existence of a wider concept: ‘this
method of writing, this snatching at life in handfuls and heaping it chaotically together’. Simply
this acknowledgement of a method contributes towards the emergence of modernism, though
clearly not in the same way as the cautiously positive probing of the ‘new kind of unity’ in
Jacob’s Room. Here, Lynd does her best to resist any connection to a wider movement, opposing
‘method’ to ‘mannerism’, and thus arguing that Woolf’s style is an unpleasant idiosyncrasy,
rather than a harbinger of literary change.
Knowing the place of Jacob’s Room in histories of modernism, it is easy to light upon
Lynd’s review as confirmation of that historically inevitable greatness. Equally, it is easy to
dismiss Lynd’s seemingly facile comments on Mrs Dalloway and its ‘wretched neurotic’. Yet I
would argue that the distinguishing feature of these reviews is not whether they make a literary
critical evaluation that we happen to approve of, but the way in which they seek to analyse new
literature. Moult’s work on poetry recognizes the fluid shifts between different ways to be
modern, and attempts to take a side. Lynd’s argument is quite different. In reading Jacob’s Room,
she tentatively recognizes the potential of a modernist method, though she does not use that
term, and her scepticism means that the movement itself is never in focus. Across the reviews of
both Jacob’s Room and Mrs Dalloway, however, Lynd is firmly oriented towards the question of
attempting to place Woolf’s novel in a relationship to some sort of cultural authority; to work
out, essentially, if it can be called ‘great’.
This question is posed relentlessly, throughout Time and Tide and indeed weekly reviews
as a genre. It is closely tied up with the nature of official culture: as new literature arrives, the
weekly review asks whether it has any chance of being admitted as great literature. See, for
example, Gerald Gould at the end of 1921.
It is asked why this age, being an age of great affairs, does not produce great literature. It is no
answer to say that it is an age of vast incidents, indeed, but also of dissolution and decay: for
Athens went on producing great literature when it was decaying. Besides, for all we know, we may
TIME AND TIDE, 1920-26
64
be struggling into the first light of a new day rather than lingering on, like ghosts, in the
shadowland of collapsed Victorianisms.70
Compared to Lynd, the promise is inverted—Gould hopes there might be something new,
rather than worrying that there might not—but the arguments are structurally identical. The
same concern is found in West’s worried characterization of Shaw and Ibsen as geniuses,
impossible to follow. E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924) was received in ecstatic terms—
again by Sylvia Lynd—and described as ‘a book of new knowledge as well as of wisdom and
education’. Tellingly, the review was titled ‘A Great Novel at Last’.71
By asking what might make a new text a piece of great literature, these book reviews
keep one eye on the relationship between a new text, and culture as a whole. For this reason, it
is useful to think about the cultural work they do in the context of a term introduced by Francis
Mulhern, ‘metaculture’. For Mulhern, metacultural discourse occurs when ‘culture, however
defined, speaks of itself’.72 He perceives two different trends: Kulturkritik, a ‘critical, mostly
negative discourse on the emerging symbolic universe of capitalism, democracy and
enlightenment’, and Cultural Studies, a more recent discipline that aims to ‘revoke the historic
privileges of “culture with a capital C” (the sovereign values of Kulturkritik) and vindicate the
active meanings and values of the subordinate majority (the so-called “masses”) as core
elements of a possible alternative order’.73 Both are discussed in terms of public intellectuals
involved with these disciplines: to take two examples from each, F. R. Leavis and Ortega y
Gasset for Kulturkritik, and Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall for Cultural Studies. As befits the
weekly review, the metacultural discourse found in Time and Tide is everyday: not long works by
public intellectuals, but editorials and book reviews. Yet it deserves the metacultural label
because of its focus—explicit or implicit—on how the texts it discusses relate to culture itself.
To an extent, Time and Tide’s publication of women writers and interest in writing for
pleasure could be said to anticipate some of the equalitarian instincts of Cultural Studies that
70 Gerald Gould, ‘Real Life’, Time and Tide, 2 December 1921, p. 1158.
71 Sylvia Lynd, ‘A Great Novel At Last’, Time and Tide, 20 June 1924, pp. 592-93.
72 Francis Mulhern, Culture/Metaculture (London: Routledge, 2000), p. xiv.
73 Mulhern, Culture/Metaculture, pp. xv-xviii.
TIME AND TIDE, 1920-26
65
would come later in the twentieth century. However, as this thesis is interested in the
emergence of modernism, the broader tendency is towards an everyday, metacultural form of
Kulturkritik: assessing emergent forms to see if they deserve to be recognized as legitimate parts
of official culture. While Time and Tide often turned against modernist texts, its overall
interpretation of modernism is marked more by a profound ambivalence, a desire to question
the place of what would come to be modernism in culture, and a reluctance—or perhaps
inability—to formulate a clear answer. As I have demonstrated, the ambivalence does
contribute towards the emergence of modernism into the public eye, but it simultaneously
shows just how unclear that public status was at the start of the nineteen-twenties.
Texts printed by the magazines could often only approach this difficult question
elliptically. In mid 1920, Time and Tide published a short story by Alec Waugh.74 Here, talented
young painter Eric Walker takes inspiration from modern industry.
The only beauty he could understand was the clean, hard efficiency of a machine. With eager eyes
he had seen stones lifted into the air by iron arms; he had watched the glow of furnaces flickering
on polished steel. For hours on end he had stood beneath the great factory at North Town, while
the sunlight cut the wreathing smoke into hard, sharp angles.75
This frustrates his patrons, who attempt to introduce him to other subjects for art (‘trees, fields,
love’) as ‘it’s what other people think nice that matters’.76 These generous patrons take Walker
to the Pacific, where he tries—and fails—to paint houses covered in flowers and sunlight on
waves. Finally—in what must be a reference to Gauguin—he finds a subject he can work on.
at the back of the small hut, an old woman, black and shrivelled, was cooking her dinner over an
iron stove. Her neck and arms were bare, and the glow of the fire shone dimly on the damp flesh,
the dying sunlight stealing in one long, broad band through a chink in the woodwork fell across her
throat, cutting the curves of her hanging breasts into hard, sharp angles, and a few yards away Eric
Walker was working at his canvas in a fine frenzy of inspiration.77
Walker’s art seems to be broadly representational; it is his subject matter, and standards of
beauty, that cause tension and confusion between him and his patrons. Furthermore, there is
74 Alec Waugh (1898-1981) was the elder brother of the more famous Evelyn Waugh. He wrote over forty books,
the most famous of were his first novel, The Loom of Youth (1917), which explored homosexuality in British public
schools, and a late novel, Island in the Sun (1956), which featured an interracial relationship. See DNB.
75 Alec Waugh, ‘You May Lead a Horse to the Water’, Time and Tide, 20 August 1920, pp. 307-09 (pp. 307-08).
76 Waugh, ‘You May Lead a Horse to the Water’, p. 308.
77 Waugh, ‘You May Lead a Horse to the Water’, p. 309.
TIME AND TIDE, 1920-26
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no sense that Eric is joining a controversial modern movement of some kind. He remains a lone,
obsessive maverick. But his rejection of traditional standards of beauty (‘what other people think
nice’), his interest in modernity, industry, and primitivism, and in particular his focus on ‘hard,
sharp angles’ mark Alex Walker as a painter who, at the very least, could be described as
uncomfortably modern.
One might argue that this text recognizes modern tendencies in visual art without
codifying and classifying a modern movement. More fundamentally, though, within the text it
is entirely unclear whether Eric is intended to be a figure of fun, or one of modern promise in
art. To be sure, his patrons’ relentless focus on ‘what other people think nice’ is difficult to read
as anything other than narrow-minded, but Alex is an otherworldly and largely unsympathetic
character whose need to find and paint sharp angles is neither justified nor defended. Where
Lynd explicitly questions whether Woolf’s novelistic style should be understood as a promising
new method, or a degenerating mannerism, Waugh’s story implicitly wonders about the
inherent value of Alex Walker’s modern paintings. Reading dialogically between the two, Time
and Tide continually questions how it should understand the emergent form of modernism; such
questions help modernism emerge, but also signal how muddy the waters were.
The same hesitation and confusion is found in the magazine’s largely retrospective
discussions of W. B. Yeats. Time and Tide published a single page potted biography, the
‘Personalities and Powers’ feature that began in the very first issue.78 In 1924, a year after Yeats
was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, Time and Tide covered his life and work. The essay
looks back over the career of a lauded establishment figure, portraying Yeats as ‘a poet in the
fullest meaning of the word’. This seems to mean romantic, lonely, otherworldly, ‘wandering in
the Celtic twilight’. Of his poetry, ‘The Stolen Child’ and ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ are
78 The inaugural text, for example, discussed Elizabeth Robins (1862-1952), one of the most prominent actors of
her time, and writer of the play Votes for Women! (1907). Her ‘Prudence and Peter’ novella, serialized in Time and
Tide in its early years, aimed to teach children how to cook. See Faye Hammill, ‘Elizabeth Robins’, in Encyclopedia
of British Women's Writing, ed. by Hammill, Miskimmin and Sponenberg, pp. 209-10.
TIME AND TIDE, 1920-26
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quoted, and his verse is described as ‘musical, melancholy, mournful; the natural expression of
a sensitive soul’.79
So far, so Wordsworthian, and clearly representative of Yeats’s earlier work. However,
while Yeats’s most clearly modernist poetry—The Tower, for instance—had not yet been written,
he was at this time starting to move away from his earlier work, and the article ends by
recognizing this.
The struggle against ‘externality’, so clearly expressed in the lack of stage effects at the Abbey
Theatre, is a marked characteristic of the later poems of Yeats. ‘Quite suddenly’ he ‘lost the desire
of describing outward things’.
…there’s more enterprise
In walking naked.80
This is not the essay’s last word on Yeats, but it is the final analysis of his poetry. It is a curious
and tentative way to frame his most recent work. Certainly, the bold, stark lines of ‘A Coat’,
quoted at the end of the extract above, do not fit the ‘Celtic twilight’ image of Yeats throughout
the article. ‘Walking naked’ is hardly ‘quaint’. Earlier lines in the poem (not quoted in the
magazine) are telling, signalling a need to move away from earlier models of poetry, and
particularly from ‘quaint and telling symbols’.
I made my song a coat
Covered with embroideries
Out of old mythologies
From heel to throat;
But the fools caught it,
Wore it in the world’s eyes
As though they’d wrought it.
Song, let them take it,
For there’s more enterprise
In walking naked.81
Without the context of these earlier lines, the reader of Time and Tide cannot make the
comparison, and must instead rely on the magazine’s own reading of the lines, as a ‘struggle
against “externality”’, linked to work at the Abbey Theatre, and a loss of interest in ‘outward
things’. This reading of the later Yeats represents a fundamental change in style from the early,
more confident images of a poet of the Celtic twilight. Crucially, however, the nature of the
79 ‘Personalities and Powers: William Butler Yeats’, Time and Tide, 8 August 1924, pp. 762-64 (pp. 762-63).
80 ‘Personalities and Powers: W. B. Yeats’, p. 764.
81 Yeats's Poems, ed. by A. Norman Jeffares (London: Macmillan, 1989), p. 230.
TIME AND TIDE, 1920-26
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article’s thought on the later Yeats remain unclear: it is difficult to say whether the placement of
this terse summation of recent work at the end of the article is a cursory glance at more recent
(and less valuable) work, or an open-ended vision of future poetry from the Nobel laureate,
characterised by a turn inwards and a more modern style. Put another way, should we read the
article’s emphasis as placed on the moment when Yeats ‘lost the desire’ or on ‘more enterprise
| In walking naked’?
In these examples, Time and Tide performs a form of metacultural discourse that is
fundamentally unsure what to make of modernism; clearly, the magazine is interested in these
emergent forms of modern literature, but this interest does not permit it to reach clear
conclusions. The reviews of Woolf and Yeats and Waugh’s short story imply broad questions
that cannot be answered. Is Woolf’s style method or mannerism? How should Yeats’s still-
developing career be understood? Should artists that resemble Eric Walker be praised or
mocked? When Time and Tide reviews D. H. Lawrence, this ambivalence does not disappear,
but it does become a source of critical energy, rather than an obstacle. Lawrence, of course, was
famous and controversial. For many critics and thinkers, an interest in experimental modern
literature often meant an interest in Lawrence: take, for instance, essays by two very different
critics in the Listener, shortly after Lawrence’s death. F. R. Leavis, reviewing Huxley’s edition of
Lawrence’s letters, compares Lawrence to Dante and argues that he is greater than Blake. As
he puts it, ‘His best art exhibits his marvellous power of compelling the reader to an
unprecedented freshness and sincerity of emotional, instinctive and sensuous experience.’82
Harold Nicolson, in the sixth of his ‘New Spirit in Literature’ series, described Lawrence as ‘the
first word of some new movement’, an artist who ‘groped passionately, fiercely, sometimes
clumsily towards some new formula for the world that is about to be born’.83
Reviews in Time and Tide were not so clear, but Lawrence’s novels were always reviewed,
with significant space devoted to them. In the period studied here, four novels by Lawrence are
82 F. R. Leavis, ‘The Living Lawrence’, The Listener, 5 October 1932, Literary Supplement, pp. iv-vii (p. vii).
83 Harold Nicolson, ‘The New Spirit in Literature—VI: Intellect and Instinct’, The Listener, 11 November 1931, pp.
823-24 (p. 823).
TIME AND TIDE, 1920-26
69
reviewed: Rose Macaulay writes on Women in Love (1921), Mary Agnes Hamilton on Aaron’s Rod
(1922), and Sylvia Lynd reviews Kangaroo (1923) and The Plumed Serpent (1926).
All these reviews perform an unusual type of metacultural analysis: they consistently
identify problems with Lawrence’s novels, but remain fascinated by them and admit as much in
the review. The reviewers see plenty to criticize, as Macaulay makes clear. She describes Women
in Love as an ‘amorphous muddle’, and that ‘there are many words of which Mr Lawrence
simply does not know the meaning’. He has a ‘large, flowing and sentimental inexactitude’, and
is likened to Amanda McKittrick Ros, a novelist now remembered largely for her purple prose.
Gerald, Ursula and Gudrun are ‘obviously and certifiably mad’.
They have indeed curious fashions of speech. Occasionally Mr Lawrence records a conversation
on general subjects, and it is pitiful to see these distraught creatures trying clumsily to have and
express thoughts on subjects other than the relations between the sexes. They are then merely
dull.84
Hamilton makes similar criticisms of Aaron’s Rod. It ‘is not, in any ordinary sense, a good novel.
Mr Lawrence cannot make his story move.’ There is ‘an infinite amount of singularly bad
dialogue’. Lawrence’s ability with character is ‘curiously limited. His people are vehicles of
emotion and of talk, and very little more. Lilly, for example, is not a person at all.’ And
Lawrence returns constantly to ‘the sexual relation’, where he is ‘most troubled and most
perverse’.85 On Kangaroo, Sylvia Lynd remarks that ‘Everything that Mr. Lawrence recreates he
recreates a little strangely’, and that ‘there is a distortion as of fever in his work, and through it
flows an inky river of half-stated thoughts and half-confessed emotion. It is better to skip a good
deal of “Kangaroo” than to read it thoroughly’.86
Similar charges are levelled at The Plumed Serpent. Lawrence’s ‘figures’ have ‘no character
inside their forms’. In order to give the reader an impression of his work, Lynd takes the odd
step of retelling a portion of the novel with layered quotations.
As for the ceremonials and general goings-on of these living gods, I am not sure that Mr Lawrence
is not almost more incredible than Rider Haggard. Let me give you some idea of them: When
84 Rose Macaulay, ‘Book Reviews’, Time and Tide, 1 July 1921, pp. 628-29.
85 Mary Agnes Hamilton, ‘Seeing Straight’, Time and Tide, 7 July 1922, pp. 641-42 (p. 641).
86 Sylvia Lynd, ‘Greater and Lesser Magnitudes’, Time and Tide, 9 November 1923, pp. 1124-25.
TIME AND TIDE, 1920-26
70
Kate Leslie was staying in Mexico she read in a newspaper that the peasants who live by a certain
lake in the interior were expecting a return of the ancient gods of Mexico, Quetzalcoatl and
Huitzilopochtli. Some time afterwards she learned that the nice general who had helped her to get
away from the bull-fight and the nice handsome man who had talked so interestingly at dinner
were really the Living Huitzilopochtli and the Living Quetzalcoatl.87
The tone is arch: the sheer silliness of Lawrence’s novel is emphasized.
Yet these very genuine problems and criticisms are interwoven with praise. More
precisely, in fact, they tend to be interwoven with the question of how Lawrence can be quite so
good, and quite so bad, almost at the same time. Macaulay’s review of Women in Love notes that
‘There are indeed many sources of joy in this book, and it will be found to repay reading aloud.’
She ends by suggesting that Lawrence’s characters are sometimes ‘so genuinely funny that one
forgives them for being also nauseating.’
One also forgives Mr Lawrence much literary incompetence, silliness and imbecile-like
unpleasantness for the beauty of some of his prose-rhythms. Though he often bungles and misses
his effects, he also often gets them, and then he is like woven tapestry with a running pattern, and
one momentarily forgets that he is absurd.88
Praise with a sting in the very last clause, perhaps, but praise nonetheless. Hamilton is more
forthright in the problems that Lawrence poses:
In so far as he undoubtedly possesses a streak of that thing we call genius, meaning, essentially,
something that bursts and evades our categories, Mr D. H. Lawrence is the most difficult of writers
to classify, place, judge. For the sense of it remains, when one has exhausted himself in criticism of
his palpable defects, his intensely irritating mannerisms. Nothing could be more obvious than that
he does not see straight, but round his queer corner he has a sight so vivid that his distorted vision
imposes itself, and, for a moment, one feels that a thing seen or rather felt with such intolerable
sharpness must be true.89
Clearly, Hamilton finds this novel troubling, and cannot easily put it aside: ‘his wild, chaotic
story undoubtedly leaves an impression on the mind that is stamped with a branding iron’.90
Reviewing Kangaroo, Lynd highlights Lawrence’s ‘wonderful descriptive writing’, and her
instruction to skip parts of the book continues by suggesting that ‘A hop, a skip and a jump may
land you safely upon scenes of strange power and beauty’.91 Her praise for The Plumed Serpent is
clearer still. She opens her review by arguing that ‘Mr Lawrence, in his new novel has painted
87 Sylvia Lynd, ‘Three Popular Authors’, Time and Tide, 5 February 1926, pp. 127-28.
88 Macaulay, ‘Book Reviews’, p. 629.
89 Hamilton, ‘Seeing Straight’, p. 641.
90 Hamilton, ‘Seeing Straight’, p. 641.
91 Lynd, ‘Greater and Lesser Magnitudes’, p. 1125.
TIME AND TIDE, 1920-26
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Mexico like a Van Gogh or a Gauguin. The energy and brilliance with which he describes
material things are amazing.’ She ends with a focus on the novel’s stark contrasts:
What energy, one exclaims as one reads this book, what brilliance of scene, what solemnity, what
grammar and how intolerable Mr Lawrence’s love of the gross and disgusting would be were it not
for his redeeming absurdity?92
These reviews do not paint an entirely consistent critical picture of Lawrence: it is immediately
noticeable, for example, that the question of Lawrence’s absurdity is a reminder of his flaws for
Macaulay in 1921 but a redeeming feature for Hamilton in 1926. But the broad impression of
Lawrence’s reception—fascination and wonder matched by derision and disgust—is found
throughout all four.
It might be argued that the novels considered here have continued to divide and confuse
critical opinion. Women in Love is clearly one of Lawrence’s most important novels, but the same
cannot be said for Aaron’s Rod and Kangaroo, which have not received a great deal of critical
attention. The Plumed Serpent, perhaps more than any other of Lawrence’s novels, tends to
frustrate its critics.93 Lawrence’s profound interest in leadership and proto-fascism does not
always make for the most comfortable reading.
There is no small truth in the argument that these reviews were some of the first forays
in a critical tradition in which these novels do not sit easily. But even if these texts do anticipate
future trends in Lawrence’s reception, they should not simply be understood as prescient.
Instead, they should be placed within Time and Tide’s general, everyday practice of metacultural
analysis, and its particular concern—as a weekly review—with whether new literature might
some day gain a legitimate place in official culture. These reviews puzzle over Lawrence’s
relation to literary tradition, and wonder how his novelistic experiments might be understood;
92 Lynd, ‘Three Popular Authors’, p. 128.
93 In Ellis and De Zordo’s Critical Assessments volumes on Lawrence, for example, James C. Cowan—one of five
critics excerpted for The Plumed Serpent—writes that ‘the brilliance of Lawrence’s symbolic conception
notwithstanding, most critics perceive a failure in coherence between the realistic and metaphorical modes of the
novel’. D. H. Lawrence: Critical Assessments, ed. by David Ellis and Ornella De Zordo, 4 vols (Robertsbridge: Helm
Information, 1992), III, 23.
TIME AND TIDE, 1920-26
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in a similar way to Lynd’s evaluation of Woolf’s Jacob’s Room and Mrs Dalloway, they attempt to
work out whether Lawrence’s way of writing novels should be encouraged or criticized.
No conclusions are reached, but these reviews are energized by the puzzling conflict
brought on by reading Lawrence’s novels. Hamilton has a fondness for two-word phrases that
criticize even as they praise: ‘intolerable sharpness’ and ‘distorted vision’. She makes the vital
problem explicit: ‘Mr D. H. Lawrence is the most difficult of writers to classify, place, judge’.
Sylvia Lynd comes the closest to directly classifying Lawrence as modernist in some way,
comparing Lawrence’s Mexico in The Plumed Serpent to Post-Impressionist art by Van Gogh or
Gauguin. It is difficult to disentangle the exact consequences of this description: is Lynd
attempting to conjure up an emphasis, say, on expression and intense colour, with a lesser
concern for representation? Turning to The Plumed Serpent itself, one can certainly see what she
means.
Kate would sit and rock on her terrace, while the sun poured in the green square of the garden, the
palm tree spread its great fans translucent at the light, the hibiscus dangled great double-red
flowers, rosy red, from its very dark tree, and the dark green oranges looked as if they were
sweating as they grew.94
As suggested, the connections are not precise, but there might be some form of association
between Lawrence as modernist novelist and a pair of linked artists, known for their
experiments with representation. While I am unwilling to place too much pressure on strict
chronology, it is perhaps significant that Lynd makes this connection significantly later (1926)
than the other reviews considered (1921-23).
What can certainly be derived from these reviews is the idea that these unsure
discussions about Lawrence’s place in modern literature have cultural significance.
Retrospectively, Lawrence’s place in British literary modernism is a matter of complex and
tangled critical debate. It is telling, for example, that Michael Bell’s discussion of Lawrence and
modernism in a Cambridge Companion perceives Lawrence as central to modernist thought but
94 D. H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent (London: William Heinemann, 1955), p. 210.
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has to wrestle with the fact that Lawrence is often neglected; Bell argues that he should be read
as the ‘repressed conscience of modernism’.95
However, my intention here is less to place Lawrence in a particular relationship to
modernism than it is to demonstrate that, for these reviewers, Lawrence certainly was modern,
and his texts proved puzzling and complex to evaluate. These unsure, worried attempts to
evaluate Lawrence should be understood as directly implicated in modernism’s emergence into
public being. In the initial range of examples from reviews, Time and Tide displays an
ambivalence towards the emerging concept of modernism, unsure whether this new work
should be considered a legitimate direction for literature, or not. In the case of D. H. Lawrence,
this tendency is developed further and made explicit. To a certain extent, this is likely due to
the fact that these are difficult novels to ‘classify, place, judge’—for the modern critic, as well as
for the contemporary reviewer.
But perhaps Hamilton’s statement that Lawrence’s writing demonstrates ‘genius’
because it is ‘something that bursts and evades our categories’ deserves closer attention. This
places Lawrence’s fiction not simply as something that is new, or controversial, or unusual, but
as a literary texts that defies classification, at least under the critical practice that Hamilton
brings to her task as reviewer for Time and Tide. Put another way, Lawrence’s modernism
appears resistant to analysis by the book reviews in this periodical. This is striking: in terms of a
history of modernism, these years in the 1920s saw many classic modernist texts published in
Britain; not only works by Lawrence and Woolf, reviewed by Time and Tide, but—to take only
the most prominent example—Eliot’s The Waste Land, which received only the most cursory
coverage. In the introduction, I referred to Peter Bürger’s concept of the avant-garde, as a
phenomenon directed at the institution of art itself, and thus not comprehensible by that
institution. Bürger’s conception of who the historical avant-gardes were is quite strict, and I
would not claim this status under these terms for, say, D. H. Lawrence. But it might
95 Michael Bell, ‘Lawrence and Modernism’, in The Cambridge Companion to D. H. Lawrence, ed. by Anne Fernihough
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 179-96 (p. 194).
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nevertheless be proposed that Time and Tide’s encounters with modernist literature share some
of the characteristics that Bürger ascribes to the relationship between art as an institution and
the historical avant-gardes. There is, at times, a disconnect that manifests itself as ambivalence:
modernism might be understood as a concept that evades the categories available to Time and
Tide at this point in history. This must not of course be construed as a criticism of Time and Tide;
rather, to return to Ian Hacking’s terminology, if modernism’s emergence into public life went
‘hand in hand’ with critical discussion of modernism, for Time and Tide in the early 1920s, that
hand-in-hand grip was at best loose, and at worst sometimes non-existent. In the next chapter, I
turn to a magazine run by individuals far more intimately associated with emergent forms of
modernist literature, to explore how a weekly magazine could begin to engage more directly
with modernism.
75
2. THE NATION AND ATHENAEUM, 1923-30
We have had the Nation for nearly seven years, without making it blood & bone of ours, as once I
thought possible.
Virginia Woolf, 5 November 1929.1
Virginia Woolf wrote this line as her husband, Leonard, resigned from his position as Literary
Editor of the Nation and Athenaeum: this chapter covers his tenure.2 Her odd metaphor—the
paper as ‘blood & bone of ours’—suggests one question: what would it have meant for a weekly
review to be ‘blood & bone’ to Leonard and Virginia Woolf? Her regretful tone suggests a
second: why did she feel that they had failed? The second question must be put aside until the
first is answered satisfactorily. It is surely uncontroversial to suggest that Leonard and Virginia
Woolf were at the forefront of literary experimentation in London in the 1920s. Virginia
Woolf’s status as modernist novelist and—almost as important—as theorist of the modern novel
needs no introduction; her husband, entirely aside from his work at the Nation and Athenaeum and
the Hogarth Press, was always her first reader. Thus if Time and Tide, closely associated with a
network of politically active women in West Hampstead, was ambivalent and unsure in its
relationship with modernism, I contend that a weekly review that was ‘blood & bone’ of
Leonard and Virginia Woolf was at once far more intimately involved in conversations about
modernism, and broadly more sympathetic towards the emerging concept of modernism.
At the same time, this periodical remained a weekly review: serious, careful, broadly
defensive of official culture. Thus a broad sympathy towards modernism is developed not
through didacticism, but cautious and reasoned argument. One of Leonard’s principal tasks
was to write a weekly page of literary notes, the ‘World of Books’, reviewing one or (more
usually) several new releases. On 18 April 1925, he wrote under the subtitle ‘Modern Poetry’.
Any reviewer will probably agree that modern poetry presents far greater difficulty to the
conscientious critic than prose, whether the essay, the short story, or the novel. The more ‘modern’
1 The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. by Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie, 5 vols (London: Hogarth Press, 1977-
1984), III, 265.
2 Forenames are used for Leonard and Virginia Woolf only because they are referred to with such frequency in this
chapter.
THE NATION AND ATHENAEUM, 1923-30
76
the poetry, the greater the difficulty. Here, may be, there suddenly pops up something which is
obviously meant to be a serious poem, but which, at first sight and on ancient standards, has no
form, no rhythm, no rhyme, no meaning. It is easy to put on the black cap, and, calling the names
of Alfred Tennyson and William Wordsworth, to pronounce all this nonsense and not poetry. And
yet every now and again one feels that such pontifical condemnation is only age and mental inertia
taking the line of least resistance—i.e., the line of resistance to everything which is new and difficult
to understand.3
Woolf asks the (presumably sceptical) reader to consider the ‘difficulty’ faced by the reviewer of
modern poetry. Crucially, his focus is not precisely on the radical nature of modern poetry, but
on the often troubling claims it makes for legitimacy in official culture: a text that is ‘obviously
meant to be a serious poem’ but seems to have ‘no form, no rhythm, no rhyme, no meaning’.
This is far from a campaign against nineteenth-century traditions: rather than calling for a
revolt against Wordsworth and Tennyson, Woolf suggests quite gently that to ‘put on the black
cap’ (and pronounce a death sentence) is ‘easy’, and might in fact reflect ‘the line of least
resistance’. Woolf argues that the reader should take the claims of modern poetry seriously; this
is framed not as a joyful, energetic act of youthful exuberance (compare Marinetti’s Futurist
Manifesto, ‘Poetry must be conceived as a violent attack on unknown forces’), but as the
considered, fair-minded judgment of a mature critic.4
Put another way, Woolf’s poetry review demonstrates how a weekly review could argue
for modernism: cautiously and carefully. In certain ways, this article shares significant common
ground with the Listener’s poetry editorial, discussed at the start of the Introduction. Intriguingly,
however, the scope of the Nation and Athenaeum’s engagement with modernism does not merely
take the form of explicit requests that modernist poetry be given a fair hearing by the initially
sceptical reader. Consider, as a quite different example, an article by Vita Sackville-West. Her
poetry review of 24 January 1925 discusses a number of anthologies, and provides some short
notes on Ernst Toller’s The Swallow Book.
[It is] a poignant picture of his [Toller’s] prison life, inevitably inviting comparison with Mr Eliot’s
‘Waste Land’, not only in its forms, but also in its mentality. These are the poets who make new
patterns from their broken shards. Intellectual rather than lyrical, they pursue their only, difficult,
unhappy path in a perplexed world. Mere music is insufficient today for the thinking poet. He
3 Leonard Woolf, ‘The World of Books: Modern Poetry’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 18 April 1925, p. 76.
4 F. T. Marinetti, Let's Murder the Moonshine: Selected Writings, ed. by R. W. Flint, trans. by R. W. Flint and Arthur A.
Coppotelli (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1991), p. 49.
THE NATION AND ATHENAEUM, 1923-30
77
turns to something tragic and ugly; something dry and desiccated; inhuman in the superficial sense,
but having perhaps a profounder relation to the spiritual problems of sixpence.5
Sackville-West’s distinction between ‘forms’ and ‘mentality’ is interesting; the implication leads
not only to a resemblance between Eliot and Toller, but the understanding that they might be
approaching modernity in a similar way. Furthermore, it seems to me that Sackville-West’s
open invocation of The Waste Land is closely linked to her discussion of key elements of
modernist poetry. Her metaphors are intimately connected to Eliot’s poem; ‘broken shards’
recall Eliot’s ‘fragments I have stored against my ruins’ (l. 430); ‘something dry and desiccated’
relates to Eliot’s focus on a lack of water in ‘What the Thunder Said’: ‘Sweat is dry and feet are
in the sand | If there were only water amongst the rock | Dead mountain mouth of carious
teeth that cannot spit’ (l. 337-39).6 ‘Something tragic and ugly’ might recall Madame Sosostris’s
prophecies (l. 43-59), the pub conversation (l. 139-72), or the mechanical sex between the
‘young man carbuncular’ and the ‘typist’ (l. 222-56). Moreover, by opposing ‘intellectual’ and
‘lyrical’, the ‘only, difficult, unhappy path’ for Eliot and Toller against the ‘mere music’ of
‘insufficient’ poetic forms, Sackville-West aligns her review with Eliot’s now-famous argument
in ‘The Metaphysical Poets’ (1921) that ‘poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be
difficult’.7
Seen in this way, the review itself is difficult. Sackville-West’s criticism praises the
profound, inhuman qualities of Toller and Eliot while slyly alluding to Eliot’s poem throughout
her review. Taking this one step further, one wonders if it is entirely coincidental that allusion is
so central to Eliot’s poetry, too. The review could thus be read as demanding but rewarding,
offering a reader soaked in contemporary poetry the chance to appreciate both the ways in
which Eliot might be influencing the terms under which new poetry is discussed, and (less
seriously) a poetical in-joke. If Time and Tide tended to wrestle, as an institution, with the
5 Vita Sackville-West, ‘Anthologies and Poets’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 24 January 1925, p. 585. Toller was
imprisoned from 1920 to 1925 for participation in a left-wing revolt that established the short-lived Bavarian
Soviet Republic.
6 ‘The Waste Land’, in The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1969), pp. 59-80.
Further references to this poem are given by line number after quotation in the text.
7 The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition, ed. by Ronald Schuchard, 2 vols to date (Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2014- ), II, 381.
THE NATION AND ATHENAEUM, 1923-30
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emerging concept of modernism, the Nation and Athenaeum goes further, both requesting (in the
case of Leonard Woolf) that the reader look sympathetically on modernist poetry, and
providing (in the case of Vita Sackville-West) a literary criticism that displays a far more
intimate knowledge of modernist literature, and entangles that knowledge within its critical
practice. As I have suggested throughout this thesis, arguments such as this did not only identify
modernism, but helped to make up the concept itself in public culture: from these two initial
examples, it might be surmised that the Nation and Athenaeum played a particularly significant
role. To return to the two questions posed by Woolf’s diary entry, this study of Leonard Woolf’s
career at the Nation and Athenaeum therefore explores how modernism is constructed by this
weekly review, before considering why his time at the magazine might—to Virginia, at least—
have been considered a failure.
*
First, if this paper was ‘blood & bone’ of anyone, it was not Leonard and Virginia Woolf
but their Bloomsbury friend, John Maynard Keynes. In early 1923, Keynes and the ‘New
Nation Company’, a small group of investors including Arnold Rowntree, L. J. Cadbury and E.
D. Simon, purchased the Nation and Athenaeum from the Rowntree Trust.8 The paper was
formed in 1921 by merging two Rowntree papers: the Nation, a Liberal political weekly edited
by H. J. Massingham since its formation in 1907, and the Athenaeum, a venerable (founded 1828)
literary and cultural paper, most recently edited by John Middleton Murry.9 Indeed, for several
years the paper was published under the title The Nation and the Athenaeum, emphasizing its hybrid
nature, two papers sutured together in the middle.10
8 Arnold Rowntree had prior links with the paper via the Rowntree Trust; as Michael Whitworth notes, he worked
with Murry on the Athenaeum. Michael H. Whitworth, ‘Enemies of Cant: The Athenaeum (1919-21) and The Adelphi
(1923-48)’, in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: Volume I, Britain and Ireland 1880-1955, ed.
by Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 364-88 (p. 366).
9 Michael Whitworth’s essay on Murry’s Athenaeum is comprehensive, but Massingham’s Nation has not yet received
sufficient scholarly attention.
10 The last issue to appear as The Nation and the Athenaeum was dated 26 June 1926. It was published thereafter as The
Nation and Athenaeum. For consistency, this later title is used throughout.
THE NATION AND ATHENAEUM, 1923-30
79
The Nation and Athenaeum’s new owners were all close to the Liberal Summer School, a
high-powered think tank that met in the early 1920s and was particularly associated with the
liberal economics practised at Cambridge by Keynes and others. Indeed, it seems clear that the
Summer School group were offered the chance to purchase the Nation and Athenaeum because of
their known political views; Walter Layton wrote to Keynes that ‘The only essential so far as I
am concerned is that the political complexion of the Nation must be in harmony with that of
the summer school group. It is because of our political opinions that the option was offered to
us, & that the capital has been put up’.11 Layton speaks of the paper as a capital investment—
that is, one that might yield money. However, the Nation and Athenaeum offers yet another
example of how the weekly review was rarely a commercially successful venture, and was more
commonly propped up by patrons. Much of Keynes’s archive for the Nation and Athenaeum
consists of writing to the magazine’s investors and asking them for just a bit more money. While
Keynes did drum up the magazine’s sales, it never turned an annual profit and never breached
ten thousand copies.12
There may have been a group behind the paper, but Keynes’s personal contribution
was immense. Robert Skidelsky emphasizes Keynes’s drive to craft a paper that would clearly
express his—and only his—political and economic views. Skidelsky portrays Keynes as a
‘preacher who needed a pulpit’, who envisaged the Nation as ‘a journalistic platform from which
to mount his assault on the policy of deflation’. Keynes’s personal control was clear: he had
‘virtually untrammelled freedom to shape the journal as he wished’.13 Keynes’s willingness to
stamp his authority on the board of directors is best seen in the discussion over who to appoint
as editor. The historian Ramsay Muir was originally preferred, as in Layton’s words ‘his name
is the one which stands most definitely for the political shade of opinion which we should give
11 Cambridge, King's College Special Collections (KCSC), J. M. Keynes Papers, King’s/PP/JMK/NS/1/1/24-25
(Layton to Keynes, undated).
12 See Appendices A and B.
13 Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes, Vol. 2: The Economist as Saviour 1920-1937 (London: Macmillan, 1992), pp.
134-36.
THE NATION AND ATHENAEUM, 1923-30
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to the Nation’.14 Muir was willing to take the position but took issue with Keynes’s evident
desire to have a powerful influence over the editor, as he wrote in a letter negotiating the
position.
The third point is the editorial powers of the Editor, i.e. his powers of selecting contributors &
distributing work among them. It is in my view an essential part of an Editor’s duty that his control
in these matters should be absolute, and that no article should be commissioned, and no writer
asked to contribute, except by him or in his name.15
Keynes quickly turned against Muir, seeming to recognize a prominent figure who might deny
him the editorial oversight and freedom he desired. He wrote to Layton five days after the
above letter.
Apart from my growing doubts as to whether he is the right man for the job, what he suggests
would make the relationship between the editor and the editorial board very different from what
we contemplated when it was first discussed. I should not think it worth while to give time and
energy and risk money under the conditions that Muir would require for himself. And it would be
impossible for me to be in a show of this kind as a sleeping or semi-sleeping partner.16
Virginia Woolf noted in her diary that she had seen Keynes, and he had declared ‘that he will
not work with Ramsay Muir’.17 He got his way, of course. Hubert Henderson, a Cambridge
economist and one of Keynes’s protégés, was employed as editor, despite his lack of experience
and enthusiasm. Keynes would not be denied, as Henderson’s wife, Faith, later noted.
Hubert raised the obvious objections. He had never edited anything; he had done very little
journalism. Maynard, like a prancing steed, overcame all his objections. He wanted him as editor,
and Hubert must not and could not refuse.18
The overall editorship must be run exactly as Keynes wished, subject to his desires.
The cultural half of the paper was a very different matter: as a weekly review, the
primary identity of this paper was political (in this case, Keynes’s Liberalism), and the task of
reviewing new books and thinking about modern culture was a subordinate concern. Skidelsky
suggests that Keynes enjoyed playing the role of ‘patron of Bloomsbury’, and I think this term is
the correct one.19 Initially, the post of Literary Editor was offered to T. S. Eliot, with the
14 KCSC, JMK/NS/1/1/24-25 (Layton to Keynes, undated).
15 KCSC, JMK/NS/1/1/12-16 (Ramsay Muir to Keynes, 2 February 1923).
16 KCSC, JMK/NS/1/1/22-23 (Keynes to Layton, 7 February 1923).
17 Diary of Virginia Woolf, II, 233 (10 February 1923).
18 Faith Henderson, ‘Editing the Nation’, Oxford Economic Papers, 5 (1953), 7-27 (p. 8).
19 Skidelsky, Keynes: Vol. 2, p. 137.
THE NATION AND ATHENAEUM, 1923-30
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intention that a literary job might allow him to leave Lloyds Bank. Prior to this, the idea of a
philanthropic fund to support Eliot’s writing had been pursued, particularly by Virginia Woolf.
She was also the origin of this new proposal, writing to Keynes in February: ‘Is there any
chance that the Nation could give him [Eliot] employment as literary editor?’.20 As far as the
documentary evidence shows, even this plan was not at the forefront of Keynes’s mind. In the
midst of arguments over whether Muir was suitable, and after Woolf’s letter requesting that
Eliot be considered, a brief note comes up in a letter from Layton to Keynes: ‘There must be a
Literary Editor.’21 Eliot himself was not sure. Writing to Sydney Schiff, he pointed out that the
job offer would ‘allow me the time to run the Criterion’;22 in another letter, to John Quinn, he
noted the multiple disadvantages:
I am now offered the post of literary editor of the Nation, at £200 a year less than my present salary
and with no assurance that the job will last longer than six months, and if I take that I shall have to
go straight into new work, which for the first six months will be very difficult and worrying, at a
moment when I feel much more like going into a sanatorium.23
For Eliot, editing the Nation would be a job not dissimilar to his current position at Lloyds, to be
measured in terms of financial loss or gain, effect on health, and only valuable for the leisure it
might afford him to pursue poetry or the Criterion. Eventually, he decided to offer such stringent
conditions on his acceptance of the position (a guarantee of two years’ employment, three
months notice for the bank, plus an extra month’s medical absence) that Keynes would be
forced to turn him down.24 Keynes reluctantly did so, writing back that ‘I am very sorry. I think
we could have worked together and made a good thing of it. I appreciate deeply your
difficulties’.25 Keynes turned to Woolf, who accepted the position just days before disappearing
on holiday to Spain. While there is no question that Woolf was qualified for the job, the whole
business rather smacks of indulgent patronage and, at the last minute, desperation: Keynes
20 The Letters of Virginia Woolf, ed. by Nigel Nicolson and Joanna Trautmann, 6 vols (London: Hogarth Press, 1975-
1980), III, 11 (to Keynes, 12 February 1923).
21 KCSC, JMK/NS/1/1/46-48 (Layton to Keynes, 17 February 1923).
22 The Letters of T. S. Eliot, ed. by Valerie Eliot, Hugh Haughton and John Haffenden, 5 vols to date (London: Faber
and Faber, 1988- ), II, 69 (Eliot to Sydney Schiff, 12 March 1923).
23 Letters of T. S. Eliot, II, 72 (Eliot to John Quinn, 12 March 1923).
24 Letters of T. S. Eliot, II, 85-86 (Eliot to Keynes, 21 March 1923).
25 Letters of T. S. Eliot, II, 88 (Keynes to Eliot, 23 March 1923).
THE NATION AND ATHENAEUM, 1923-30
82
could support one of his friends, and he needed someone to look after the literary half while he
got on with the real business of politics and economics.
*
Putting a positive spin on this situation, Leonard Woolf might, therefore, have been
offered a perfect opportunity to exercise editorial freedom. Looking back on his years at the
Nation in his autobiography, he seemed proud of his work there, writing that ‘I doubt whether
any weekly paper has ever had such a constellation of stars shining in it as I got for the Nation’.26
At the time of his appointment, Woolf was more reserved, writing to Margaret Llewelyn Davies
that ‘I have been asked to become Literary Editor of the Nation. […] I should rather not, but
the question of money has made me say that I will on certain conditions’.27 Woolf wrote more
elaborately to Lytton Strachey.
I expect you have heard that, having failed as (a) a civil servant, (b) a novelist, (c) an editor, (d) a
publicist, I have now sunk to the last rung on which stand Jack Squire, Desmond MacCarthy,
Edward Shanks, and Penguin—literary journalism. I am now Literary Editor of the Nation and
Athenaeum, and I would not even have sunk to that, if I had not been told that you had agreed to
write for it.28
While this letter clearly has more than a dash of self-deprecating humour in it, Virginia’s
comments in an earlier letter to Jacques Raverat were less ambiguous. ‘Leonard first lost his job
[on Massingham’s Nation], which ruined us, and has now been made literary editor, which is
almost as bad.’29 Nonetheless, in his first months on the job Leonard seems to have seized the
opportunity offered to him. His purview at the paper was significant: while he declined to
continue writing articles on foreign affairs (his role at Massingham’s Nation) he took a salary of
£500, and agreed to write a weekly page of literary notes—‘The World of Books’—as well as
26 Leonard Woolf, Downhill All The Way: An Autobiography of the Years 1919-1939 (London: Hogarth Press, 1967), pp.
129-30. He lists some contributors who appeared in the first months of his editorship: Bertrand Russell, George
Lowes Dickinson, Maxim Gorky, Augustine Birrell, Roger Fry, Edward Joseph Dent, Walter Sickert, T. S. Eliot,
Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, Osbert Sitwell, Richard Hughes, Stella Benson, Robert Graves,
Vita Sackville-West, and Arnold Toynbee.
27 Letters of Leonard Woolf, ed. by Fredric Spotts (London: George Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1990), pp. 225-26 (to
Margaret Llewelyn Davies, 5 April 1923).
28 Letters of Leonard Woolf, pp. 283-84 (to Lytton Strachey, 4 May 1923). Squire and MacCarthy were successive
literary editors of the New Statesman; Edward Shanks was a poet and critic. I have not been able to identify
‘Penguin’. Strachey wrote in Woolf’s very first issue in charge of the literary half; see Lytton Strachey, ‘Sarah
Bernhardt’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 5 May 1923, pp. 152-53.
29 Letters of Virginia Woolf, III, 23 (to Jacques Raverat, 30 March 1923).
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83
edit the literary half.30 While Woolf’s exact responsibilities are never spelled out, they would
have certainly included organizing the books for review and selecting reviewers, commissioning
articles, and helping to make up the paper, as well as writing his literary notes. He was in the
office for two and a half days a week, yet as Victoria Glendinning notes his work amounted to a
full time job, much of which he had to do at home.31
At first, Virginia was an active participant in these editorial responsibilities, particularly
when it came to encouraging writers to contribute to the Nation. While on holiday in Spain in
1923, she reached out to her friends. She wrote to Roger Fry, asking him to ‘Remember the
Nation’, perhaps attempting to remind Fry of a commitment to write.32 A few days later she
wrote to Molly MacCarthy, informing her of Leonard’s new job, and relaying that ‘he wishes to
get hold of your memoirs. Would you consent? Very slight alterations would be needed; and
how delightful to humanise the Nation, which is dry and bald as bone’.33 To Vanessa Bell, once
returned. ‘Maynard [Keynes] wants a special literary supt. in a hurry. Wont you write
something? or Duncan?’34
As Leonard adapted his social life to incorporate the intense demands of his editorship,
and both he and Virginia wrote to their friends to request that they contribute to the Nation, one
sees how the promise that the paper might become ‘blood & bone of ours’ might have been put
into practice. The (literary) Nation and Athenaeum under Woolf has often been described as a
Bloomsbury paper; consider Robert Skidelsky’s brief assertion, in his biography of Keynes, that
‘Bloomsbury writers dominated the back part of the paper’, or Victoria Glendinning’s note that
‘Leonard’s old Cambridge and Bloomsbury friends wrote for him’.35 Victoria Rosner goes
30 Brighton, University of Sussex (US), Leonard Woolf Papers, SxMs-13/1/I/1/b, 1-4 (letters between Keynes and
Leonard Woolf, 25 March-14 April 1923).
31 Victoria Glendinning, Leonard Woolf (London: Simon & Schuster, 2006), p. 256.
32 Letters of Virginia Woolf, III, 29 (to Roger Fry, 16 April 1923). Fry first wrote in July; see Roger Fry, ‘Degas’, The
Nation and Athenaeum, 28 July 1923, pp. 549-50.
33 Letters of Virginia Woolf, III, 30 (to Molly MacCarthy, 22 April 1923). The serialization began in September; see
[Molly MacCarthy], ‘A Nineteenth-Century Childhood: I’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 1 September 1923, pp. 683-
84.
34 Letters of Virginia Woolf, III, 31 (to Vanessa Bell, 28 April 1923). As it turned out, neither Vanessa Bell nor Duncan
Grant wrote for the 19 May literary supplement.
35 Skidelsky, Keynes: Vol. 2, p. 137; Glendinning, Leonard Woolf, p. 257.
THE NATION AND ATHENAEUM, 1923-30
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further, associating the Nation and Athenaeum with other Bloomsbury ‘formal joint ventures’,
including the Hogarth Press and the Omega Workshops.36
It is certainly true that many prominent members of the Bloomsbury group wrote for
the paper: alongside Leonard’s weekly pages of literary notes, Virginia Woolf and Clive Bell
were frequent contributors, with Roger Fry and Lytton Strachey also writing for the magazine.
But it is also worth noting that characterising the Nation and Athenaeum as a Bloomsbury paper
does not reveal a great deal about the nature of the contents. Certainly, it does not hold true
that members of Bloomsbury shared a unified viewpoint, as Michael Holroyd usefully illustrates.
Leonard Woolf was always passionately interested in politics; Lytton, though he inclined to become
more leftish under his brother James’s persuasion during the war, was largely indifferent to political
questions of the hour. Clive Bell enthused over the most abstract art; Roger Fry held aloof; while
Lytton himself was even more conservative and dismissed Clive Bell’s Art, in a letter to James
Strachey, as ‘utter balls’ (22 February 1914). Though he had learnt at Cambridge to enjoy a
literary appreciation of the visual arts, Lytton considered that both Clive Bell and Roger Fry were
downright silly in their highflown admiration of Matisse and the early Picasso, and he made some
attempt through Vanessa Bell to discourage Duncan Grant from the post-impressionist and cubist
influences under which he was falling. As for Maynard Keynes, Lytton maintained that he
possessed no artistic sense whatever; and Clive Bell held a similar opinion of Harry Norton.
Despite his tenuous friendship with E. M. Forster, who was certainly no atheist or even agnostic,
Lytton found his novels quite unreadable—a view similar to that which Virginia Woolf affected to
hold of his own biographies—while his aesthetic differences with Roger Fry, who injected a mood
of earnest Quakerism into the group, effectively stifling the movement towards sybaritic pleasure,
were, according to Gerald Brenan, enlivened by personal antipathy.37
Describing the paper as a part of Bloomsbury would not, therefore, necessarily imply that the
periodical took a particular critical perspective on cultural matters. Indeed, many critics—both
those involved with Bloomsbury, and those studying it—have argued that the defining feature
of Bloomsbury was not a particular viewpoint or set of viewpoints, but simply free and open
conversation. Victoria Rosner roots Bloomsbury in Gordon Square, at a time ‘when a group of
young people met together with no greater ambition than to speak freely and live as they
chose.’38 Duncan Grant, remembering Virginia Woolf for Horizon in 1941, argued Bloomsbury
was ‘Conversation: that was all’.39 But it is difficult—as is discussed in greater depth below—to
36 The Cambridge Companion to the Bloomsbury Group, ed. by Victoria Rosner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2014), p. 10.
37 Michael Holroyd, Lytton Strachey: A Critical Biography, 2 vols (London: Heinemann, 1967-1968), II, 418-19.
38 Bloomsbury Group, ed. by Rosner, p. 2.
39 Duncan Grant, ‘Virginia Woolf’, Horizon, June 1941, pp. 402-06 (p. 404).
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85
understand whether these Bloomsbury conversations could ever have taken place in a weekly
review.
Importantly, as editor Leonard resisted the charge that he had given a Bloomsbury
flavour to the paper. In late 1923, Woolf clashed with Hubert Henderson, the overall editor,
over a controversial book review, and Woolf’s choice of reviewers. The central conversation
was verbal, but Woolf’s letter after the fact clearly refers to the question of whether or not
Woolf’s sympathies to Bloomsbury were problematic.
I do think that we differ rather fundamentally in our tastes. (I naturally think that I am right and
you wrong, but not, I assure you, in the supercilious sense that is thought to be characteristic of
‘Bloomsbury’. It is simply that if I think a piece of writing good, I think that I am right—and there
is an end of it; I admit that I may be completely wrong.)40
Woolf thus resists the charge that he is characteristic of Bloomsbury, but refuses to change his
style. Henderson’s reply was conciliatory, but again emphasizes Woolf’s Bloomsbury
connection.
I like very much the general character & quality of what you put into the paper. I have no
antipathy to ‘Bloomsbury’; &, if I feel—this is what our difference in taste really amounts to—that
the sort of criticism that you especially like, is not sufficiently appreciative of the better type of non-
Bloomsbury writing, that causes me very little worry.41
Several years later, Hubert Henderson wrote to Virginia Woolf in order to assuage concerns of
log-rolling, as the Nation and Athenaeum was reviewing To The Lighthouse. Henderson assured her
that the Nation and Athenaeum would cover her novels even if she had ‘no connection with the
paper’, and brings in Keynes as a supporting example: ‘Would you have us not notice books
written, say, by Maynard?’42
To describe the Nation and Athenaeum as a Bloomsbury paper may therefore have been
true—in that its owners and some of its key contributors were closely associated with the
group—but it is not necessarily revealing. But Woolf’s 1929 regret that the paper might once
have been ‘blood & bone’ to her and Leonard might be taken in a different way: what if the
early period of Leonard’s editorship is modelled as a time when the Woolfs, in the thick of new
40 US, SxMs-13/1/I/1/c/3 (Leonard Woolf to Hubert Henderson, 26 September 1923).
41 US, SxMs-13/1/I/1/c/4 (Hubert Henderson to Leonard Woolf, 29 September 1923).
42 Brighton, University of Sussex (US), Monks House Papers, SxMs-18/1/D/69/1 (Henderson to Virginia Woolf,
3 June 1927). Henderson’s letter is clearly a reply to a letter from Woolf, which has been lost.
THE NATION AND ATHENAEUM, 1923-30
86
literature in London, were able to drive a paper that shared their views; a weekly review that
might have argued for modernism. Leonard may have been unsure about taking the job on the
Nation and Athenaeum, but he (and his wife) seemed to plunge into the fray of literary journalism.
On 19 May 1923—Leonard’s third issue in charge—Virginia Woolf wrote on Dorothy
Richardson’s experimental prose.
She has invented […] a sentence which we might call the psychological sentence of the feminine
gender. It is of a more elastic fibre than the old, capable of stretching to the extreme, of suspending
the frailest particles, of enveloping the vaguest shapes.43
Woolf goes on to tease out the implications of this difference between the new and the old prose.
Therefore, in reading ‘Revolving Lights’ we are often made uncomfortable by feeling that the
accent upon the emotions has shifted. What was emphatic is smoothed away. What was important
to Maggie Tulliver no longer matters to Miriam Henderson […] here we have […] Miss
Richardson proving that the novel is not hung upon a nail and festooned with glory, but, on the
contrary, walks the high road, alive and alert, and brushes shoulder with real men and women.44
Where Sylvia Lynd, for Time and Tide, questioned the potential long-term use of Virginia
Woolf’s new method of writing, Woolf herself proposes Richardson’s method as a more
definitely understood, and fundamentally more promising, shift in the literary landscape. She
suggests ways to name Richardson’s new ‘elastic’, ‘psychological’ sentence, and argues, crucially,
that the modernist novel might find a place in the literary canon. Woolf’s concluding point is
that Richardson’s work might differ from George Eliot, but this very difference proves that the
novel is ‘alive and alert’.
Of course, it is only to be expected that Virginia Woolf’s review of a modernist novel
would be more understanding of and sympathetic to modernism. But the importance of what
the Nation and Athenaeum was doing is found not in a single article, but in the continual effect of
different literary critics, week in and week out, continuing to think about modernism, and thus
bringing the concept into public being. These were not always positive reactions, and they were
not always directly associated with Bloomsbury, but they were almost always carefully thought
through. One week after Woolf’s comments on Richardson, Robert Graves reviews Edith
43 Virginia Woolf, ‘Romance and the Heart’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 19 May 1923, Literary Supplement, p. 229.
44 Woolf, ‘Romance and the Heart’.
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87
Sitwell; he does not particularly like her poetry, but argues that ‘the most extreme reaction in
modern poetry against the Patriarchal system and its accompanying philosophies [...] find[s] its
expression in the poetry of a young woman’, and that ‘even Mr Joyce’s “Ulysses”, unwieldy and
rambling a book as it is, has a certain hopeful structure’.45
In June, T. S. Eliot reviewed a new edition of John Donne’s love poems. He focused
directly on the question of why Donne’s work appears to be particularly popular now.
Our appreciation of Donne must be an appreciation of what we lack, as well as of what we have in
common with him. What is true of his mind is true, in different terms, of his language and
versification. A style, a rhythm, to be significant, must embody a significant mind, must be
produced by the necessity of a new form for a new content. For this reason the extraordinary
virtuosity of Tennyson is of little use to us. And for this reason, I suspect, most contemporary verse
is so uninteresting in rhythm and so poor or so extravagant in vocabulary. The labour of
composition for a poet today is very great, and the amount of time that he must expend on
experiment unlimited. Verse and language have not kept up with economic progress, and have
halted behind the development of sensibility. The dogmatic slumbers of the last hundred years are
broken, and the chaos must be faced: we cannot return to sleep and call it order, and we cannot
have any order but our own, but from Donne and from his contemporaries we can draw
instruction and encouragement.46
Later that month, Richard Hughes praised Herbert Read’s new volume of poetry, Mutations of
the Phoenix.
One always turns, nowadays, to unrhymed verse with a greater expectation of a sense of form than
one finds in most rhymed composition; and in the case of Mr Read is not disappointed. His
creative faculty of rhythm is very highly developed; and he has obviously an appreciation of the
nice interaction of rhythm of thought, the processional sequence of idea, with the surface-rhythm of
sound.47
It is crucial to emphasize that the Nation and Athenaeum does not have a significantly more secure
grasp on the concept of modernism than Time and Tide. Many of these reviewers make their
sympathies clear, but they rarely have a clear term for literary experiments, or for precisely how
literature should change in the modern world. What they do share is a drive to puzzle away at
these questions, from Woolf’s proposal of the ‘psychological sentence of the feminine gender’ to
Hughes’s musings on the ‘rhythm of thought’ and ‘surface-rhythm of sound’, and from Eliot’s
vague yet stark demand that ‘we cannot return to sleep and call it order’, and Graves’s
recognition that young writers have a problem with the ‘Patriarchal system’.
45 Robert Graves, ‘The Eagle and the Wren’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 26 May 1923, pp. 272-73 (p. 272).
46 T. S. Eliot, ‘John Donne’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 9 June 1923, pp. 331-32 (p. 332).
47 Richard Hughes, ‘Mutations of the Phoenix’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 23 June 1923, pp. 399-400 (p. 400).
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88
Leonard Woolf’s hand in these arguments is of course hard to measure, though the
literary editor’s ability to choose who to send new books to—thus potentially introducing new
writers to the magazine—is not to be sniffed at. In these early months, readers could therefore
witness these reviewers musing on modernism, in some cases—Virginia Woolf and Eliot stand
out—as those writers continued to develop their own modernist fiction and poetry.
Furthermore, one might point to an unusual special offer the Nation and Athenaeum proposes for
readers in September 1923. If they take out an annual subscription (thirty shillings), they get
two free books: J. M. Keynes’s A Revision of the Treaty (1922) and Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room
(1922).48 This advertisement is thus a moment where the Nation and Athenaeum imagines its
audience as one interested in a Keynesian perspective on economic policy, and modernist
fiction.49
Leonard Woolf’s weekly essays were not always sure about the value of new literature, a
tendency discussed in greater detail below. On 10 November 1923, he proposed that ‘We live
ourselves in a silver, or electro-plate, age so far as literature is concerned’.50 Presumably, to
suggest the presence of a golden age—something higher in quality than silver or electro-plate—
requires a stable understanding of the literary field that Woolf cannot grant himself. But in
December, some of this stability might seem to come when Virginia published an essay on two
competing groups of novelists, ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’.
This essay, with its division between Edwardian and Georgian writers, is the precursor
to a later, longer version given as a talk to the Cambridge Heretics in early 1924, and published
in the Criterion in July 1924.51 Confusingly, this longer version was later republished as a
Hogarth Press pamphlet, also titled Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown, and some criticism refers to
48 ‘Special Offer for Subscribers [advertisement]’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 1 September 1923, p. 693.
49 More cynically, this offer may also have been an opportunity for the publishers (Macmillan for Keynes, the
Hogarth Press for Woolf) to clear out any excess stock of the books.
50 Leonard Woolf, ‘The World of Books: The Lost Flute’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 10 November 1923, p. 222.
Electroplating is a process of forming a thin metal coating on an object by electrolysis; presumably Woolf means
electroplated silver as opposed to pure silver.
51 See The Essays of Virginia Woolf, ed. by Andrew McNeillie and Stuart N. Clarke, 6 vols (London: Hogarth Press,
1986-2011), III, 420-38.
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‘Character in Fiction’ by this title. While Woolf’s ideas have been thoroughly explored by
scholarship, ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ takes on a slightly different form when it is
understood as an entry in a weekly review, and as a part of a developing conversation about the
concept of modernism in that weekly review.
In the Nation and Athenaeum, ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ opens by locating itself in time.
The other day Mr Arnold Bennett, himself one of the most famous of the Edwardians, surveyed
the younger generation and said: ‘I admit that for myself I cannot yet descry any coming big
novelist.’52
Those opening words—‘the other day’—are worthy of close attention. They are permissible in
a weekly review—covering new literature and keeping on top of the news—in a way that they
might not be in a periodical published at lengthier intervals. Indeed, this form of opening is not
quite generic, but is hardly unusual for articles, especially middles, in this type of magazine;
note, for instance, the first leading article in Time and Tide, quoted in the previous chapter,
which begins ‘Last week at Leamington’.53 But in this case, Bennett did not write ‘the other
day’. Woolf was responding to an essay by Bennett published by Cassell’s Weekly on 28 March,
eight months prior. Yet Woolf insists on a temporally local relationship between Bennett’s
argument and her response. Those opening lines are a deeply Woolfian construction, a taut
colloquialism that underlines the sense of debate. This first version of ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs
Brown’ never exists in isolation, but is always oriented towards Bennett’s earlier words. Scholars
have followed this presentation of immediate debate by closely analysing the disagreement
between Bennett and Woolf. Samuel Hynes’s 1967 essay attempts to rescue Bennett from
Woolf’s attack, while Beth Rigel Daugherty’s response in 1983—her essay echoes Hynes’s title,
just as Hynes echoes Woolf—again takes up Woolf’s side.54
52 Virginia Woolf, ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 1 December 1923, pp. 342-43 (p. 342).
The same essay had first appeared in the New York Evening Post, on 17 November 1923.
53 ‘[Last Week at Leamington...]’, Time and Tide, 14 May 1920, p. 1.
54 Samuel Hynes, ‘The Whole Contention between Mr Bennett and Mrs Woolf’, NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, 1
(1967), 34-44; Beth Rigel Daugherty, ‘The Whole Contention between Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Woolf, Revisited’, in
Virginia Woolf: Centennial Essays, ed. by Elaine Ginsberg and Laura Gottlieb (Troy: Whitston, 1983), pp. 269-94.
THE NATION AND ATHENAEUM, 1923-30
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Bennett’s original article, ‘Is the Novel Decaying?’, was printed in Cassell’s Weekly.55 This
was a new paper; founded earlier in 1923, it was purchased towards the end of that year by
politician and journalist T. P. O’Connor (1848-1929), renamed T. P.’s and Cassell’s Weekly, and
continued publishing until 1929. At two pence, Cassell’s was a third of the price of the Nation and
Athenaeum. There were many weeklies priced at two pence, on a range of topics, some of which
sold hundreds of thousands of weekly copies (though figures are unfortunately not available for
Cassell’s).56 This particular magazine is quite similar to the better-known John O’London’s Weekly;
both were broadly oriented towards cultural matters, but compared to a sixpenny they carried
more advertising, shorter articles, and more short fiction. They occupied a slightly unusual
cultural position: writing in 1932, Q. D. Leavis considered the stock in different newsagents and
suggested that one might find ‘a few cultural weeklies of different levels’. The New Statesman and
Nation had to be ordered, but John O’London’s did not: it was ‘merely a résumé of publishers’
advertisements, literary gossip, with an original short story’.57 At the same time, this magazine is
grouped with the Nation and New Statesman, rather than with ‘2d. weekly papers in magazine
form containing the crudest marketable fiction’.58
If Cassell’s Weekly thus shared certain qualities with the Nation and Athenaeum, the
differences between the two papers are also key. Where sixpenny weeklies were serious,
politically minded, and authoritative, twopennies were more openly engaged with a modern,
mass audience. Jonathan Wild suggests that John O’London’s Weekly was aimed at a public that
‘lacked formal education in the study of literature’ but had begun to read widely in the First
World War. Therefore, ‘a degree of didacticism was clearly welcomed’, but it was ‘interspersed
with lighter material’.59. Both these aspects are clearly seen in Bennett’s essay, which is brief,
55 Arnold Bennett, ‘Is the Novel Decaying?’, Cassell's Weekly, 28 March 1923, p. 47.
56 For circulation figures of a range of twopenny weeklies, see T. B. Browne Ltd, The Advertiser's ABC, 45 vols
(London: T. B. Browne, 1887-1931).
57 Q. D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public (London: Chatto & Windus, 1932), p. 10. Leavis’s book was published
in 1932; presumably, this survey was carried out prior to 1931, when the Nation and Athenaeum merged with the New
Statesman.
58 Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public, p. 12.
59 Jonathan Wild, ‘“Insects in Letters”: John O'London's Weekly and the New Reading Public’, Literature & History, 15
(2006), 50-62 (pp. 50-51).
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sharp, humorous, and didactic. He argues that nothing is more important in the novel than
character.
The foundation of good fiction is character creating, and nothing else. The characters must be so
fully true that they possess even their own creator. Every deviation from truth, every omission of
truth, necessarily impairs the emotional power and therefore weakens the interest.
Modern novelists, Bennett suggests, are ‘interested more in details’, and ‘attach too much
weight to cleverness, which is perhaps the lowest of all artistic qualities’. Having set up these
frames for criticism, he turns his attention to Woolf, writing that ‘I have seldom read a cleverer
book than Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room’. For Bennett, cleverness is a loaded quality, and he
goes on to develop his attack.
[Jacob’s Room] is packed and bursting with originality, and it is exquisitely written. But the
characters do not vitally survive in the mind because the author has been obsessed by details of
originality and cleverness. I regard this book as characteristic of the new novelists who have
recently gained the attention of the alert and curious, and I admit that for myself I cannot yet
descry any coming big novelists.60
Bennett’s own argument, of course, recalls Sylvia Lynd’s analysis of Virginia Woolf in Time and
Tide, though where Lynd seems at least open-minded—while she worries that Woolf’s fiction
might potentially be a dead end—Bennett is brusquely definite. Jacob’s Room holds no promise: it
is all insipid style, and no meaty substance.
Daugherty’s reading of the debate is acute, and recognizes the gendered subtext to
Bennett’s criticisms. Woolf was not just pushing back against Bennett’s dislike of Jacob’s Room,
but a wider debate about gender and writing, refuting Bennett’s view of women writers as
naturally and inevitably limited.61 Crucially, Daugherty demonstrates that ‘Woolf’s differences
with Bennett existed long between Bennett wrote a single critical word’.62 While this is certainly
true, the publication contexts of these two particular sorties in the conflict—Bennett’s attack in
a twopenny weekly, and Woolf’s reply in a sixpenny—also deserve attention. Bennett’s
argument in Cassell’s is essentially patriarchal and populist, assuming the unqualified support of
a large audience against a tiny, isolated minority who enjoy Woolf’s work. We can all agree,
60 Bennett, ‘Is the Novel Decaying?’.
61 Daugherty, ‘The Whole Contention, Revisited’, pp. 273-77.
62 Daugherty, ‘The Whole Contention, Revisited’, p. 269.
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Bennett argues, that character is everything, great literature is Alexandre Dumas and Thomas
Hardy, cleverness is overrated, and Jacob’s Room has made merely a ‘great stir in a small
world’.63
Daugherty argues that Woolf’s reply in the Nation and Athenaeum is ‘much less powerful’
than the later, longer Hogarth Press pamphlet, and that it ‘evades the real argument’.64 The
later version is seen as more important; Quentin Bell has argued that Mr Bennett and Mrs
Brown—the longer version—was ‘Virginia’s own private manifesto’, where she outlined ‘her
programme for the next decade’.65 Nevertheless, this first version of ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs
Brown’ does have critical force, but makes its arguments in a form wholly appropriate to the
sixpenny weekly review. Where Bennett makes brusque assertions and attempts to gather the
audience together in support of obvious truths about literature, Woolf muses more cautiously
on the problems faced by modern fiction.
She accepts his insistence on the centrality of character, but draws the now-famous
distinction between the Edwardians (a group that includes the trio of Bennett, H. G. Wells, and
John Galsworthy), and the Georgians, a group that is typically (and fairly) taken to indirectly
include Woolf. Woolf’s challenge is orientated around the fact that Edwardians had to
differentiate themselves from the Victorians for two reasons. First, she suggests, ‘the young
novelist became a reformer’, discussing Samuel Butler’s critique of the Victorian Weltanschauung.
Second, Woolf emphasizes the publication of Dostoevsky in English, and novelistic characters
that did not match what Woolf perceives as a Victorian model of characters with few but
prominent features (caricatures, essentially). Dostoevsky’s characters are a challenge: ‘We go
down into them as we descend into some enormous cavern […] it is all dark, terrible, and
uncharted’. Famously, the Edwardians fail to respond: ‘in none of them are we given a
character whom we know’.66
63 Bennett, ‘Is the Novel Decaying?’.
64 Daugherty, ‘The Whole Contention, Revisited’, p. 278.
65 Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf: a Biography, 2 vols (London: Hogarth Press, 1972), II, 105.
66 Woolf, ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, p. 343.
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In the closing paragraphs, Woolf turns to the Georgians, though she does not explicitly
identify herself as one of them.
The Georgians had, therefore, a difficult task […] To bring back character from the shapelessness
into which it has lapsed, to sharpen its edges, deepen its compass, and so make possible those
conflicts between human beings which alone rouse our strongest emotions—such was their
problem. It was the consciousness of this problem, and not the accession of King George, which
produced, as it always produces, the break between one generation and the next. Here, however,
the break is particularly sharp, for here the dispute is fundamental. […] To disagree about
character is to differ in the depths of the being.
It is these last two paragraphs that contain the essay’s most famous lines, expanded in the
essay’s later, longer version. Woolf ends with the assessment that this Georgian endeavour is not
currently successful, but deeply promising; ‘that [Georgian] chapter will be one of the most
important, the most illustrious, the most epoch-making of them all’.67
This closing claim is rightly famous: Woolf’s individual, sidelong way of making claims
for her own brand of modernist fiction. Yet—as suits a sixpenny weekly—it is broadly defensive
of official culture. Her contention is that the new Georgian way of writing novels might, in time,
turn out to be ‘epoch-making’. Furthermore, while this final claim is famous in its own right, it
develops directly from that focus on character that originates with Arnold Bennett. Daugherty
describes this character focus as a weakness, reading Woolf’s original argument as too closely
bound to the terms set by her opponents in this argument.68 But it can be seen in another way,
as a way of exploring modern literature entirely appropriate to the sixpenny review. Bennett—
with no-nonsense prose—asserts that character is all there is, and that everyone knows what
character is. Woolf and the Nation and Athenaeum do not dismiss this as the rant of a philistine—
one wonders what the Little Review would have made of Bennett—but instead take the claim
seriously, and interrogate it. Bennett claims character is central: fine. But is character limited to
what he believes it to be? Maybe not. And are these new writers crafting a new way to catch
Mrs Brown? Not for certain—but perhaps. Therein the excitement lies. Modernism—that
sense that the Georgians might indeed be ‘epoch-making’—emerges just a little more into the
67 Woolf, ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, p. 343.
68 Daugherty, ‘The Whole Contention, Revisited’, p. 278.
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public eye. Crucially, the nature of that emergence depends on ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’
operating in a way that upholds, rather than challenges, the traditions of the sixpenny weekly
review.
*
This optimistic possibility should not be taken lightly. But it cannot be pretended that
the Nation project was one of energy and optimism, fuelled by a consistent drive to repurpose
the form of the weekly review for a perspective sympathetic towards modernism. In other words,
enthusiasm for the Nation project was short-lived. Leonard Woolf was offered the Nation post
two days before he and Virginia left on holiday for Spain. Virginia wrote about her experiences
of travelling to and in Spain for Leonard’s first issue of the Nation.69
Back in England, and sunk in the drudgery of reviewing, Woolf wrote that ‘I must read
Miss Dorothy Richardson, having been bribed by very large sums of money to do what of all
things I have come to detest—write reviews for the Nation’.70 As Leonard’s time at the paper
progresses, even these irritated mentions of the paper’s responsibilities die out: it seems to
become merely something that has to be done in order to pay the bills, and the paper only
crops up as a burden. In June 1926, Virginia writes that Leonard is prevented from visiting
Ottoline Morrell with her due to his ‘Nation horrors’.71
Leonard’s dislike of his editorial post, though, is of greater significance in this case.
Victoria Glendinning suggests that Leonard ‘remained satisfied with what he had achieved at
the Nation’; even if this is an accurate retrospective, it was not reflected in his behaviour on the
job.72 Leonard started on a salary of £500, with significant editorial responsibilities and two
and a half days in the office, for what was essentially a full time job. In September 1923, after
less than six months, he first offered to let his role in the paper lapse at the end of the year, over
69 Virginia Woolf, ‘To Spain’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 5 May 1923, pp. 153-55.
70 Letters of Virginia Woolf, III, 34 (to Janet Case, 4 May 1923). Virginia Woolf’s dislike of reviewing is well known;
see Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (London: Vintage, 1997), pp. 720-21. While Lee discusses a late essay by Woolf,
her dislike of literary reviewing was evident throughout her life.
71 Letters of Virginia Woolf, III, 268 (to Ottoline Morrell, June 1926).
72 Glendinning, Leonard Woolf, p. 257.
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what he felt was excessive control (by Henderson) over his reviews.73 In September the
following year, his dissatisfaction was indicated by negotiations to reduce his salary to £400,
with reduced responsibilities.74 In March 1925, he gave his six months notice to Keynes (writing
that ‘I find it takes up more time than I am really prepared to give to go on giving to it’), but he
was evidently talked into carrying on.75 In July 1926, he again offered a resignation, and was
again persuaded to continue, subject to a further reduction in salary, and a further reduction in
duties so that he was just responsible for writing the ‘World of Books’ notes, and ‘dealing with
the books issued for review’—presumably, choosing who to send them to and editing the
resulting reviews.76 In 1927, though, he claimed in a letter to Edmund Blunden that ‘I still write
a page in the Nation but do little else there’.77 He finally resigned at the end of 1929.78
This series of attempts to resign is reflected in his carefully phrased comment on the
Nation and Athenaeum in his autobiography. He does indeed boast of the ‘constellation’ of people
he recruited to work for him, but dissatisfaction constantly pops up. For example, discussing his
resignation he notes that ‘my work as literary editor revealed to me the corroding and eroding
effect of journalism upon the human mind’. He emphasizes how, under the original
arrangement of work, he had to do a ‘considerable amount’ at home, and that ‘I also had to
read a rain of articles and journals with which journals like the Nation are perpetually deluged.
No one who has not been an editor and/or a publisher can have any idea of how badly many
people can write.’ Indeed, the ‘main interest’ of his Nation position was not the work but ‘the
people with whom my work brought me into contact’. Later, Leonard is more specific, stating
that ‘after about five years of it, I began to grow rather restive’; again, a few pages on, ‘After
73 US, SxMs-13/1/I/1/c/3 (Leonard Woolf to Henderson, 26 September 1923).
74 US, SxMs-13/1/I/1/b/6 (Keynes to Leonard Woolf, 24 September 1924).
75 US, SxMs-13/1/I/1/b/10 (Leonard Woolf to Keynes, 24 March 1925).
76 The minutes of a meeting of the Nation directors on 14 July 1926 note that ‘Mr Leonard Woolf had agreed to
write “The World of Books’ and to deal with the books issued for reviews at an Annual stipend of £250. In view of
this arrangement his resignation was withdrawn.’ KCSC, NS/2/18-20.
77 Letters of Leonard Woolf, p. 296 (to Edmund Blunden, 26 July 1927).
78 US, SxMs-13/1/I/1/b/12 (Leonard Woolf to Keynes, 14 December 1929).
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four years as literary editor of the Nation I already began to feel I had had enough of this kind of
journalism’.79
Thus it is likely fair to conclude that Leonard Woolf disliked his job at the Nation. This is
not an issue that is often discussed by periodical studies, simply because most magazines—and
all little magazines—were projects that involved passion and dedication, not disillusionment
and attempted resignation. In most cases, if an editor wished to resign the magazine simply
halted publication. Even within the weekly reviews, passion was the norm. Rhondda would
write in her autobiography that ‘To edit […] a weekly paper, the kind of weekly review that I
enjoyed reading, […] that was pure joy’.80 Similarly, John St Loe Strachey, whose editorial
career at the Spectator is discussed in greater detail in Chapter 3, was utterly dedicated to his
magazine. As his wife Amy Strachey wrote, ‘I do not think anyone ever enjoyed an editorship
as much as St Loe did.’81 Leonard Woolf, clearly, had a very different relationship with the
Nation. The appropriate language belongs to management studies, a discipline that rarely
impinges on literary studies yet for obvious reasons has great interest in understanding why
people like or do not like their jobs. Leonard exhibits a low level of job satisfaction; both ‘global
satisfaction’—he does not see pleasure in literary journalism as a whole—and ‘facet satisfaction’,
the different specific aspects of his job. In the examples given, he is clearly dissatisfied with his
superiors, the nature of the tasks assigned to him, and the time demanded by those tasks.82
Yet Woolf persevered for seven years: as Eliot recognized in 1923, a job in mainstream
literary journalism had its (financial) advantages. Furthermore, even if he came to view the job
as tedious and thankless, he consistently defended his editorial independence. This is seen first
in his threat to resign in late 1923: Woolf argued with Henderson over reviews written by
Raymond Mortimer (on A. A. Milne) and George Rylands (on Lady Gregory and Florence
79 Woolf, Downhill All The Way, pp. 128-41.
80 Margaret Haig Thomas, This Was My World (London: Macmillan, 1933), pp. 304-05.
81 Amy Strachey, St. Loe Strachey: His Life and His Paper (London: Gollancz, 1930), p. 149.
82 John Arnold and Ray Randall, Work Psychology: Understanding Human Behaviour in the Workplace, 5th edn (Harlow:
Pearson Education, 2010), p. 261.
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Darwin). 83 In 1926—after Leonard’s responsibilities had been significantly reduced—
Henderson spiked an article by Richard Aldington, most likely a review of Alec Waugh’s On
Doing What One Likes (1926). Henderson called Aldington’s suggestion that Waugh should have
stuck to cricket ‘grossly offensive’.84 Woolf responded angrily, defending Aldington’s talent and
character.85
Neither of these disputes were conflicts over modernism per se, though it is useful to
note that in both cases Leonard is defending contributors (Rylands, Mortimer, Aldington) who
were largely sympathetic towards modernist literatures in their attacks on broadly conservative
writers (Milne, Waugh). In this context, the figure of the periodical editor defending a
controversial text against a censor is a familiar one to students of modernism, most obviously in
the case of the Little Review, and its legal troubles printing Wyndham Lewis’s short story
‘Cantelman’s Spring-Mate’ and, of course, Joyce’s Ulysses.86 It is telling—given, once again, that
the periodical in question is a weekly review, not a modernist little magazine—that these
disputes occurred not externally, but internally, as Woolf attempted to carve out a space for
literary criticism that allowed his contributors to speak freely.
These crises may have been dramatic, but they were also rare. Alongside them, though,
one detects a more humdrum and everyday set of negotiations about space. Leonard claimed in
Downhill All The Way that ‘In the editorial rooms of weekly newspapers there is or was an
unending struggle for space […] a violent struggle for space between politics and literature’.87
Evidence of this struggle at the coal face, as it were, is found in letters Leonard wrote to Keynes
in late 1924 and early 1925, comparing ‘relative space’ allocated to literature and politics in the
83 Letters of Leonard Woolf, pp. 284 n. 3, 285 n. 1.
84 KCSC, NS/1/2/41 (Henderson to Woolf, 10 August 1926).
85 Letters of Leonard Woolf, p. 294 (to Hubert Henderson, 13 August 1926). Frederick Spotts’s note points out that
Leonard lost this debate, and that in any case Aldington soon refused to write for the Nation and Athenaeum after
Leonard ‘accepted an article by a critic who had run off with Aldington’s wife’.
86 See Rachel Potter, Obscene Modernism: Literary Censorship and Experiment, 1900-1940 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2013), pp. 74-75, 93.
87 Woolf, Downhill All The Way, p. 140.
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Nation and Athenaeum and the New Statesman under the editorship of Clifford Sharp.88 First, he
makes a general argument about the squeezing of the literary half.
I wish you would look at the enclosed figures of the average space […] You are making the paper
[the Nation and Athenaeum] more and more political precisely at the moment when—owing to the
position of the Liberal Party—you are bound temporarily at any rate to lose a little on the political
side. You are materially deteriorating the literary side precisely at the moment when [Clifford]
Sharp—very cleverly, I think—is all out, not only to do you on the political side, but at the same
time to strike you as hard as he can on the literary. Hence he gives his literary side an average of 5
pages more than his political while you give yours 1½ pages less. I am sure the latter policy is
wrong.89
Presumably, Keynes did not respond to Leonard’s satisfaction, as he wrote again in March
1925.
I hope you will not mind my harping on the old chord but here are the figures of relative space
since Jan. 1. You will note that I have never had more than 22 cols since Jan 10, whereas Desmond
[MacCarthy] has had less than 22 cols on only two occasions and has had as many as 27 and 28
cols. Now a middle of just over three columns and two columns of Alpha [& Omega, a page of
short notices] leaves me in a predicament that if I am to get 21 cols and have 14 of reviews, I have
less than two cols over in the front of the paper, i.e. too little for another middle, a science or an art
article. The result is that I either have to have 12 col of reviews which is really inadequate or
squeeze down Alpha until it looks silly. We have already practically abolished science, art, and
music, and are on the way to abolishing drama from the Nation. It also means that the squeeze is
so perpetual that one never dares try to get anything new. I now practically never ask any one to
write an article though I often think of something which I should like to get. I do not do so because
I know that, if I did, I should have to refuse our best contributors. I am sure that my part of the
Nation has deteriorated.90
Leonard Woolf may not have enjoyed his job, but this does not mean that he did not defend his
turf. This second letter, in particular, shows Woolf scrapping over each small element of the
periodical’s make-up: the important difference between twelve and fourteen columns of reviews,
the difficulty of introducing new contributors into the paper’s space, the problems in a desire to
bring cultural coverage beyond literature—music, art, drama, science—into the paper.
Essentially, these protests signify as an attempt to remind the proprietors of a politically
oriented weekly that there was cultural material too, and it should not be forgotten. If the
magazine as a whole is constructed spatially, then it is always clear that the front of the
magazine reflects the dominant concern, notwithstanding the ability of the reader to
88 The New Statesman was edited by Clifford Sharp from 1913-30, though in the last years Sharp’s alcoholism meant
that he was only nominally in control of the paper. The literary half was edited by Leonard’s friend Desmond
MacCarthy from 1920-29.
89 Letters of Leonard Woolf, p. 290 (to Keynes, 13 December 1924).
90 US, SxMs-13/1/I/1/b (Leonard Woolf to Keynes, 15 March 1925).
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deconstruct such hierarchies and read the magazine. Patrick Collier has written illuminatingly
on just this concept in relation to the Illustrated London News.
The representational agenda visible in the Illustrated London News crucially involves interventions at
the intersection of space and value, cultural work with literary, journalistic, and imperial
ramifications. That is to say, newspapers produce themselves as representations of their self-defined
territory, at the most basic level, by affording value-marked page space to items that they deem
valuable (and thus, implicitly, by assigning peripheral page space, few column inches, or no page
space at all, to other items). Their logic is in this sense metonymic and microcosmic: they shrink
the world, on a daily or weekly basis, into a manageable package that can be consumed within the
leisure time of the reader. (As Headline News today promises, ‘Give us ten minutes and we’ll give
you the world.’) They make their vast territory legible by bringing it down to size, as it were.91
By offering itself to readers as a way to survey the empire, the Illustrated London News constructs
itself as an empire in miniature, easily surveyable and comprehensible by the reader, who is
thus cast in the commanding imperial position. Collier recognizes that spatial arrangements of
this type recreate the power structures of empire, where items deemed important are brought to
the front, and those deemed unimportant relegated to the back or not covered at all.
Prominence in the spatial arrangement of the magazine becomes an expression of power and
influence. While the centre/periphery model is particularly relevant to Collier’s interrogation of
the ILN’s imperial reporting, it applies to the Nation and Athenaeum also. Woolf, as editor, is
protesting the squeeze placed on an already marginal space.
Yet Woolf’s desire to construct his half of the magazine spatially goes beyond this. His
own retrospective of a ‘battle for space’, plus his contemporary reminder of the size and nature
of the cultural space, suggest that the Nation and Athenaeum cannot merely be read spatially, but
that its literary editor was keen to construct it as such. Put another way, in Henri Lefebvre’s
terms Woolf’s defence of space as editor constitutes a form of spatial practice, ‘a projection onto
a (spatial) field of all aspects, elements and moments of social practice’.92 In a richly evocative
phrase, Lefebvre later remarks that ‘the spatial practice of a society secretes that society’s
91 Patrick Collier, ‘Imperial/Modernist Forms in the Illustrated London News’, Modernism/modernity, 19 (2012), 487-
514 (p. 492).
92 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. by Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), p. 8.
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space’.93 Thus, Woolf’s behaviour as editor—defending the space of the literary half—secretes
the space itself.
This emphasis on Woolf’s practice matters because it must surely be entangled within
his dislike of his job. Virginia Woolf’s original hope of a paper that might be ‘blood & bone’ to
her and Leonard implies a space that might somehow by characterized, or even driven, by a
sympathy for modernism. But though Leonard defended his space, his dislike of the job suggests
that it could never quite be this. In a perceptive if idiosyncratic essay, Cyril Connolly drew a
distinction between ‘dynamic’ and ‘eclectic’ magazines, and their respective editors.
The dynamic editor runs his magazine like a commando course where picked men are trained to
assault the enemy position: the eclectic is like an hotel proprietor whose rooms fill up every month
with a different clique.94
Notably, his image of the dynamic editor is concerned with motion (a committed military
assault), whereas the eclectic editor is referred to as the proprietor of a hotel: a place. It is
important, I suggest, not to mistake the many arguments for modernism made in the Nation and
Athenaeum for an institutional sympathy for modernism.95 Instead, Leonard presided over a
space that was identified not with a drive to promote modern literature, but, in the absence of
passionate editorial drive, the general concern of the weekly review to evaluate culture with
caution and care. The ways in which the Nation and Athenaeum encountered modernism must be
understood in this context.
*
This does not of course mean that the paper had no important role to play in public
discussions of modernism. This may have been a critical space born out of indifference, but it
was an important space nonetheless. The focus on a guarded space without a defined editorial
drive means that the work different contributors did at the Nation and Athenaeum should be
93 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p. 38.
94 Cyril Connolly, ‘Fifty Years of Little Magazines’, Art and Literature, 1 (1964), 95-109 (p. 95). I am indebted to
Faith Binckes, who introduced me to this essay.
95 This distinction is a further reminder that the exploration of space in modernist texts, and of space in texts that
discuss modernism are two very different things. For work on the former, see Andrew Thacker, Moving Through
Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003).
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understood as the (relatively) free play of individuals in a space that did not purpose them to
promote modernist literature, but simply allowed them the space to evaluate new literature, and
think about what it might mean for culture.
The focus is therefore less on Leonard Woolf’s passion to argue a certain way, and more
on the writers he published, many of whom—far more than the other magazines covered by
this thesis—were either directly involved in writing modernist literature, or were interested in
thinking about why modernism might be important. Naturally, one might argue that had Woolf
acted as a passionate, driven, commando-like editor, the same thing would have happened, but
I do not think that the distinction is a facetious one. The difference between a periodical
institution that announces itself as pushing the boundaries of literature, and one that might
have a disinterested editor, but contributors involved in modernism, is significant.
Consider, then, as a first example, the career of Edwin Muir at the Nation and Athenaeum.
Muir is best known for the poetry that he wrote towards the end of his life, but he began as a
critic and essayist; in the years studied here, he was just beginning to write poetry seriously
alongside journalism.96 For the Nation and Athenaeum he frequently wrote the ‘New Novels’
column, as well as other reviews. Across his work for the periodical, he demonstrated time and
again an interest in modern literature, a preference for modernism and a desire to make this
argument for the public.
For instance, Muir disliked Gerald Gould’s The English Novel of To-day, as it ‘does not
show the novelist the outline of his present problem as it exists: it simply disapproves of the
problem’. Gould does not like Joyce or Lawrence, but cannot see, Muir argues, that ‘Mr Joyce’s
Leopold Bloom […] is more “in the thick” than any Victorian character, and Mr Joyce’s
Dublin […] is more concrete than any Victorian town’.97 In 1925, Muir writes a series of
articles on ‘Contemporary Writers’, on Lytton Strachey; D. H. Lawrence (‘he has awakened
our minds to the existence of a new realm of consciousness’); T. S. Eliot (‘As a poet Mr Eliot
96 For further details on Muir, see DNB and Andrew Frisardi, ‘The Anomaly of Edwin Muir’, The Hudson Review, 52
(2000), 576-86.
97 Edwin Muir, ‘Past and Present’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 18 October 1924, pp. 116-18.
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lacks seriousness […] he is bitter, melancholy, despairing, but he is not serious’); Aldous
Huxley; Virginia Woolf; Robert Graves; Edith Sitwell.98 Muir’s piece on Virginia Woolf turns
outwards to suggest that the ‘literature of to-day’ has a ‘certain note of inhumanity’. He showers
Mrs Dalloway, in particular, with effusive praise, and links it to poetry and Joyce.
The rhythm of the prose is exquisitely graded; it has profited, one feels, as prose may, whether
poetry may or not, from the experiments which have been made in vers libre: in the daring and
fullness of the metaphors it has a remote indebtedness to Homer. There is no English prose at
present, except Mr Joyce’s which in subtlety and resource can be compared with it.99
Muir would later review To The Lighthouse, which he again admired—though he still preferred
Mrs Dalloway—and particularly praised ‘Time Passes’: ‘For imagination and beauty of writing it
is probably not surpassed in contemporary prose’.100
Muir was prolific, and always particularly likely to probe emerging concepts of
modernism. But it is also important to note that he was only one of many critics who wrote
about modernism for the Nation and Athenaeum. Thus far, I have quoted from Leonard and
Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, Robert Graves, Clive Bell, and T. S. Eliot. But to take a
wider survey, one might also point to Raymond Mortimer, who reviewed Paul Valery’s Le
Serpent, focusing mainly on its introduction by Eliot, as he was ‘the most distinguished living
writer of English poetry’.101 An unsigned review of new poetry in 1926—including volumes by J.
C. Squire and Carl Sandburg—argued that ‘In Europe we are beginning to realize that if
poetry is to be kept alive, it must be brought in contact with a world that has been changed, and
is still being changed, by scientific discoveries’. Squire’s poems, by contrast, are ‘only dust under
their poetic wrappings’.102 Edith Sitwell reviewed Peter Quennell’s Poems in early 1927,
declaring them ‘fresh, clear and original’ and belonging ‘to no school […] neither modern nor
98 Edwin Muir, ‘Contemporary Writers: I—Lytton Strachey’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 25 April 1925, pp. 102-04;
Edwin Muir, ‘Contemporary Writers: II—Mr D. H. Lawrence’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 4 July 1925, pp. 425-27;
Edwin Muir, ‘Contemporary Writers: III—Mr T. S. Eliot’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 29 August 1925, pp. 644-46;
Edwin Muir, ‘Contemporary Writers: IV—Aldous Huxley’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 27 February 1926, pp. 743-
44; Edwin Muir, ‘Contemporary Writers: V—Virginia Woolf’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 17 April 1926, pp. 70-72;
Edwin Muir, ‘Contemporary Writers: VI—Mr Robert Graves’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 14 August 1926, pp. 554-
55; Edwin Muir, ‘Contemporary Writers: VII—Edith Sitwell’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 18 September 1926, pp.
698-700.
99 Muir, ‘Virginia Woolf’, p. 72.
100 Edwin Muir, ‘Fiction’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 2 July 1927, pp. 450-52 (p. 450).
101 Raymond Mortimer, ‘Significant Form’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 28 February 1925, pp. 750-51 (p. 750).
102 ‘Poetry’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 5 June 1926, p. 252.
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ancient’.103 Later that same year, Herbert Read wrote on Wyndham Lewis’s Time and Western
Man, taking the opportunity to ruminate on aesthetic responses to modernity.
Against the giant Flux (and that is the shortest and most expressive word to describe all the
complex and confused varieties assumed by modern Humanism) there has emerged a small band
of Davids, as yet badly organized, and not a little uncertain, among themselves, what they are to
do when they have destroyed the giant.
His examples of ‘Davids’ are Cubism (though not Futurism, which is apparently part of the
‘Flux’), the poetry ‘associated with the name of Mr Eliot’, ‘neo-Thomism’ in Catholic theology,
and ‘philosophical critics’, including Eliot, T. E. Hulme, Julien Benda, and Wyndham Lewis.104
There are many more examples that could be drawn upon. Wherever or whenever they
appeared in the literary half, they appeared near to Leonard Woolf’s page of literary notes,
‘The World of Books’. From 1923 to 1930, writing this column was Woolf’s most consistent
task as Literary Editor, a task that he performed over three hundred times. He only rarely
demonstrates the same close focus on modernist literature as one finds in, for instance, Edwin
Muir; instead, one immediately notices the breadth of his coverage. ‘The World of Books’
might review a new novel, or a selection of history books, or biographies, poetry, linguistics,
politics, economics. One example of Woolf’s analysis—his 1925 discussion of modern poetry—
has been discussed above. In June 1924, he reviewed E. M. Forster’s new novel, A Passage to
India.
So the book builds itself up, arch beyond arch, into something of great strength, beauty, and also of
sadness. The themes are woven and interwoven into a most intricate pattern, against which, or in
which, the men and women are shown to us pathetically, rather ridiculously, entangled.105
Woolf—like most contemporary reviewers—praised the book in the highest terms. He and
Forster were of course closely connected socially, and praise of this kind could be construed as
log-rolling—that is, authors praising works by their friends. During Woolf’s time at the Nation
and Athenaeum, this was a common occurrence; to look at the issue sympathetically, one might
remark that Woolf and his friends were writing some of the most important works of fiction and
103 Edith Sitwell, ‘A New Poet’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 8 January 1927, pp. 514-15 (p. 514).
104 Herbert Read, ‘Time and Mr Wyndham Lewis’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 19 November 1927, pp. 282-24 (p.
282).
105 Leonard Woolf, ‘The World of Books: Arch Beyond Arch’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 14 June 1924, p. 354.
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history and literary criticism, but were also prominent reviewers. That being said, it is at the
very least striking that, throughout the period covered here, few of the writers discussed saw any
conflict of interest when they praised each other in reviews: here, Woolf on Forster; elsewhere,
Woolf on Roger Fry, or Clive Bell on Harold Nicolson.106 Virginia Woolf’s worry about the
Nation and Athenaeum reviewing To The Lighthouse, discussed above, was rare.
But my intent here is less to focus on friends reviewing friends than it is to consider the
Nation and Athenaeum as a guarded space for the discussion of culture. To a large extent, it
matters less that Woolf saw no problem in heavily praising his friend’s book, and more that he
took the opportunity to probe how new texts might best be discussed. In the above review of A
Passage to India, Woolf is clearly trying to work out a critical language that will best represent
Forster’s novel. Rather than seeing the book as being comprised of plot and character—recall
Bennett’s reductive suggestion that the novel is character and nothing else—Woolf implies that
Forster’s novel is built, ‘arch beyond arch’. It constructs an ‘intricate pattern’, within which the
characters are ‘pathetically […] entangled’. This is both a careful attention to form, and a focus
on the way in which the different characters in A Passage To India (especially Dr Aziz and Adela)
are trapped within the social and political matrices of the Raj.
This tendency—attempting to find an appropriate language to review new books—
recurs. Reviewing a survey of the English novel, he notes that ‘The critics of to-day seem to be
greatly concerned about the novel’, with some (his example is E. M. Forster) ‘cheerfully
analytic’, but others less so. These ‘come with the grave and professional faces of doctors
gathered about the bedside of a patient whom they contemplate, not without a little satisfaction,
as suffering from an astonishing complication of disorders’. Woolf’s response is, once again, to
muse carefully, this time on novelistic tone and warmth. This may be ‘an age of disillusionment’,
106 Leonard Woolf, ‘The World of Books: Mr Roger Fry’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 27 November 1926, p. 304;
Clive Bell, ‘We Are Amused’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 16 July 1927, p. 519.
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105
as ‘in the minds of our best novelists there seems to be this bare spot, a kind of mental vacuum
which lowers the level of their temperature and the temperature of their books’.107
Leonard wrote an obituary for Thomas Hardy, a writer whom he greatly admired. He
suggested that Hardy was the ‘last of a dynasty’, and compares those writers to the modern
novel.108
None of the leading writers of the generation or generations which followed Hardy—and now
survive him—whatever their merits or their defects, write novels in this pure tradition; they have
other axes to grind in social problems or the subtleties of psychology or the sophistications of
literary form and expression. And since each generation gets the literature which it understands,
appreciates, and deserves, the traditional English novel is out of fashion; its real merits are not
properly appreciated; it seems to the present generation clumsy and monumentally primitive.109
This is neither quite criticism of the ‘traditional English novel’ nor praise for the new
‘generation’; for Woolf, it is a shame that the former is ‘out of fashion’ and ‘not properly
appreciated’, but equally the modern novel is that which the new generation ‘understand,
appreciates, and deserves’. It has different concerns: society, psychology, aesthetic form.
At the very end of his career at the Nation and Athenaeum, in 1929, Woolf tackles the
question of modernism head-on.
We have been told for a long time, both by revolutionaries like Mr Lawrence and Miss Sitwell and
by such guardians of the ‘well of English undefyled’ as Lord Brentford—and I therefore believed—
that this was a time of literary Bolshevism. It was not a question of Right Wing Socialism or
reformist pinks; Parnassus had already been captured by the reddest, revolutionary literary
geniuses who had ever written in vers libre or in syncopated prose. In a general way one had the
impression that tradition had gone by the board in every department of literature.110
He then proceeds to move through each ‘department’, citing Eliot as leader of a group that had
‘stormed the ancient citadel of poetry’; for the novel, the ‘new school of novelists had
“liquidated”, as the Bolsheviks say, the old form of novel as it was known to Jane Austen or
107 Leonard Woolf, ‘The World of Books: The Novel of To-Day’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 3 December 1927, p.
356.
108 The list of ‘one of the great Royal Houses of English literature’ in full: ‘Meredith, Thackeray, Dickens, George
Eliot, Charlotte Brontë, Scott, right back to Fielding, naming them, one feels at once that they belong to the same
blood royal, the same race, the same tradition’. Leonard Woolf, ‘Thomas Hardy’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 21
January 1928, pp. 597-98 (p. 597).
109 Woolf, ‘Thomas Hardy’, p. 598.
110 Leonard Woolf, ‘The World of Books: The Bolshies on Parnassus’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 14 December 1929,
p. 402.
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Flaubert’; the drama had been ‘transformed into a new vehicle of art and emotion’ and ‘Mr
Strachey had blown up the ancient three-decker biography’.111
Note, first of all, that sense of time: these assertions of literary Bolshevism have been
going on ‘for a long time’. This is very far from Time and Tide’s unsure musings on the status of
modernism. Then again, while Woolf admits that his own sympathies lie towards ‘this alleged
world-revolution’, his construction of an odd, slightly humorous political analogue to modernist
experimentation means that the Nation and Athenaeum holds itself back from supporting these
ideas. The conceit is, on the whole, more than slightly whimsical, a tone that makes this piece
as literary criticism very much of its time. The wry comment comparing experiments in the
novel to Soviet ‘liquidations’ is of course deeply uncomfortable, given what is now know about
the nature of those liquidations.
Woolf does not conceal his personal sympathies—clearest in this last 1929 editorial—
but carefully writes a literary criticism that always acknowledges readerly scepticism, while still
searching for the most appropriate way to talk about modernist literature, even without that
word itself. This criticism ranges from the deeply serious—as Woolf attempts to find the
appropriate way to talk about E. M. Forster—to the uncomfortably whimsical, as literary
experiment is consciously militarized. Compared to the reviews and essays written by Edwin
Muir and Vita Sackville-West (for example), Woolf’s criticism turns to modernism less
frequently, and when it does leaves a greater and more considered space for the sceptical reader
to have their day. This might simply reflect a subtly different attitude towards modernism as it
emerged into public life, but it might also be ascribed to Leonard’s position—even if that
position was disliked—as literary editor. If Leonard constructed a guarded space for cultural
discussion, the governing location in that space was ‘The World of Books’. As editor, Leonard
could employ critics who would write forcefully and charismatically about modernism,
moderating those voices with the more cautious, and more broad-based arguments in his
111 Woolf, ‘The Bolshies on Parnassus’.
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column. This was not, of course, necessarily a conscious tactic, so much as behaviour that
typified the weekly review; even within the Nation and Athenaeum, caution and care were
paramount.
*
Ultimately, the dense and energetic discussions of modernism in the Nation and Athenaeum
suggest that Woolf’s regret that she and Leonard had failed to make the periodical ‘blood &
bone’ to them might have been misplaced. Leonard may not have liked working for the
magazine—and Virginia may not have liked reviewing at all—but it is nevertheless clear that
Leonard Woolf maintained a space for cultural journalism that thought carefully about the
emerging nature of modern literature.
Envisaging a periodical as a space that hosts different voices talking about modernism
has given rise to the claim that those voices should be understood as in conversation. Suzanne
Churchill and Adam McKible make this claim quite clearly, arguing for a ‘conversational
model for modernism’.
We do not deny the presence of competition, territorialism, and even antagonism among various
little magazines, their editors, and contributors. […] these publications also fostered surprising
alliances, encouraged dialogue among opposing points of view, and promoted cooperation among
writers from competing artistic and political camps. […] Little magazines provide a published
record of the richness, variety, chaos, and exhilaration of modernist talk.112
Churchill and McKible draw explicitly on Christine Stansell’s 2000 work on avant-gardes in
New York. Stansell emphasizes the importance of free-wheeling speech in the ‘conversational
community’ of Greenwich Village, which she links to the ‘self-consciously shocking and
intimate talk of Bloomsbury’, though for Stansell the community in New York was far more
heterogenous. As Stansell argues, ‘The mingling of men and women in conversation came to
seem the very essence, the condition of modernity.’113
112 Little Magazines & Modernism: New Approaches, ed. by Suzanne W. Churchill and Adam McKible (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2007), pp. 12-13.
113 Christine Stansell, American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2010), pp. 83-84, 89.
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108
Furthermore, Alan Golding’s work on the Little Review reads it as a ‘magazine in
persistent dialogue with itself […] internally dialogic, enacting an ongoing and often heated
conversation about modernism within its own pages’.114 Golding suggests that the Little Review
encouraged disagreements between contributors, and dissent; Margaret Anderson, the editor,
did not wish to publish ‘something that monolithically reflected her own taste and thinking, but
rather a magazine that offered positions worth arguing with’.115 Golding gives a remarkable
example from 1916:
Anderson persistently engaged in critical fashion with the contents of her own magazine, and with
her own editorial standards, strikingly so in her August 1916 editorial ‘A Real Magazine’. The Little
Review, she complains bitterly, ‘has been published for over two years without coming near its ideal’.
[…] Remembering where editorial responsibility lies, finally Anderson turns to direct self-critique:
‘I loathe compromise, and yet I have been compromising in every issue’.116
Neither of these models—a conversational community, an internally argumentative
periodical—entirely resembles the Nation and Athenaeum. But it might also be recalled how
central the concept of conversation was to Bloomsbury, or at the very least to the Woolfs and
their immediate friends. Some evidence for this is quoted above, but Virginia Woolf herself
provides a particularly thrilling model for Bloomsbury talk.
The argument, whether it was about atmosphere or the nature of truth, was always tossed into the
middle of the party. Now Hawtry would say something; now Vanessa; now Saxon; now Clive; now
Thoby. It filled me with wonder to watch those who were finally left in the argument piling stone
upon stone, cautiously, accurately, long after it had completely soared above my sight. But if one
could not say anything, one could listen. One had glimpses of something miraculous happening
high up in the air.117
Might the Nation and Athenaeum—with its space to host different critics, talking excitedly about
new art, bringing the concept of modernism into the public eye—not be understood in much
the same way? Even if the Woolfs disliked the job, might these voices, in this space, not be
understood as a form of conversation? Under this idea, ‘something miraculous happening high
114 Alan Golding, ‘The Little Review’, in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: Volume II, North
America 1894-1960, ed. by Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 61-84
(p. 62).
115 Golding, ‘The Little Review’, p. 79.
116 Golding, ‘The Little Review’, pp. 79-80.
117 Virginia Woolf, ‘Old Bloomsbury’, in Moments of Being: Autobiographical Writings, ed. by Jeanne Schulkind
(London: Pimlico, 2002), pp. 43-61 (p. 51).
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109
up in the air’ might even be repurposed as a image of modernism itself, explored and emerging
in this magazine under Leonard Woolf.
The possibilities of such an idea should certainly be taken seriously. From the reader’s
perspective, the presence of different critics in the Nation and Athenaeum reviewing and analysing
modern literature might indeed be taken as a form of cultural conversation, as one encounters
different opinions and measures them against each other: Edwin Muir’s full-throated defence of
Joyce against Leonard Woolf’s more measured praise for modern poetry, for example. But the
model proposed by Churchill and McKible goes further than this, arguing that conversation in
a magazine was a form of ‘modernist talk’, a snappy and sometimes directly confrontational
process well explored by Alan Golding in relation to the Little Review.
Here—at least in relation to the Nation and Athenaeum—it is important to sound a note of
caution. Firstly, while there were cases of internal dialogue, they tended to be resolved in
private, rather than in the pages of the magazine. Clive Bell’s spat with T. S. Eliot in 1923 is an
excellent example of this. Having rejected Keynes’s offer of a job in early 1923, it seems that
Eliot felt an obligation to write when possible; a postscript in a letter to Keynes once the affair
was settled states that ‘I should like very much to offer my help toward the Nation in any way
within my power—if you should care ever to call on me, it would be an obligation & a
pleasure’.118 He wrote the essay on John Donne, discussed above, and further reviews were in
the pipeline. But then in late September, Clive Bell—never the most diplomatic of writers—
wrote a cynical essay for the Nation and Athenaeum that managed both to inflate his own prestige
in discovering Eliot and rubbish Eliot’s poetry. He stated that ‘I was one of the first in England
to sing the praises of T. S. Eliot’, and that ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ was a ‘minor
masterpiece’ that ‘raised immense and permissible hopes’. But unfortunately, Eliot has ‘written
nothing else’. He sees The Waste Land and Eliot’s other work as simply re-treading the same
ground, and offers only double-edged praise.
118 KCSC, NS/1/1/64-65 (Eliot to Keynes, 26 March 1923).
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By his choice of words, by his forging of phrases—manipulations possible only to an artist with an
exact ear—Eliot can make out of his narrow vision and meagre reactions things of perpetual
beauty.119
Eliot, as one might have guessed, was not pleased. He wrote to Wyndham Lewis of a
‘Disgusting and filthy article on me by Clive Bell in Nation—sort of thing one can only receive in
silence.’120 To J. M. Robertson, Eliot stated that Bell’s article was ‘incorrect in its facts and
malignant in its assertions’;121 to Ottoline Morrell, he wrote that the article ‘made me feel as if I
was covered with lice’.122 Lewis suggested that Eliot must withdraw all promised articles from
the Nation, but in the end Eliot decided not to ‘pick a quarrel with the Nation on this point.’123
He delivered two reviews that had been promised—on Marvell, and on a book on Elizabethan
drama—but he would not write again for Woolf until 1926.124
Crucially, this argument can only be excavated by reading Eliot’s letters: the public face
of the magazine gives nothing away, apart from the initial presence of Eliot in its pages,
followed by his absence. Then again, there are indeed instances within the magazine that
promise the presence of genuine and active debate, debate that seems to show modernism as
‘something miraculous happening high up in the air’. One of the most prominent of these is
found in a series of three responses to Virginia Woolf’s Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown, published in
the Nation and Athenaeum in late 1923 and early 1924. One can say with certainty that they are
direct responses because they assert their identity as such. J. D. Beresford opens in a way that
again relates to the frequent periodicity of the weekly, and perhaps even deliberately echoes
Woolf on Bennett: ‘In a recent article, Mrs Woolf suggested’.125 He is largely critical of Woolf’s
arguments, and it seems that she persuaded a friend, Logan Pearsall Smith, to write a second
119 Clive Bell, ‘T. S. Eliot’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 22 September 1923, pp. 772-73 (p. 773).
120 Letters of T. S. Eliot, II, 224 (Eliot to Wyndham Lewis, 26 September 1923).
121 Letters of T. S. Eliot, II, 228 (Eliot to J. M. Robertson, 1 October 1923).
122 Letters of T. S. Eliot, II, 232 (Eliot to Ottoline Morrell, 2 October 1923).
123 Letters of T. S. Eliot, II, 226-7 (Eliot to Lewis, 1 October 1923).
124 See T. S. Eliot, ‘Andrew Marvell’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 29 September 1923, p. 809; T. S. Eliot, ‘The
Beating of a Drum’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 6 October 1923, pp. 11-12.
125 J. D. Beresford, ‘The Successors of Charles Dickens’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 29 December 1923, pp. 487-88
(p. 487).
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111
response against Beresford. 126 His contribution emphasizes the ongoing debate with a
whimsical metaphor.
Mrs Woolf, in her recent answer to Mr Beresford in these columns, and Mr Beresford, with his
reply to Mrs Woolf, have started a hare, and inaugurated a hunt of such fascination that even the
most grizzly and retired of critical greyhounds must be irresistibly tempted to leap from his kennel
and join the chase.127
Michael Sadleir’s final essay references a conversation ‘which has now for several weeks held
the attention of Nation and Athenaeum readers’.128
While the presence of critics who believed themselves to be in dialogue with one
another (and stated as much in their writing) is clearly significant, the nature of debate is also
important. In this context, the three responses of Woolf’s ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ become
notable not so much for their conversation as for their lack of it. Beresford’s reply, for instance,
summarizes Woolf’s argument as proposing that ‘the chief failing of those three important
novelists, Wells, Galsworthy, and Bennett, has been their inability to create character in the
manner of, say, Dickens and Thackeray’. Beresford ignores entirely Woolf’s focus on how the
novel might change in the modern world, and muses oddly on his suggestion that the characters
of Wells, Bennett and Galsworthy are not memorable because ‘in the eighteen-forties there
were more queer, one-sided, less complicated, less self-conscious people about in England than
there are in the nineteen-twenties’.129 While new participants in a debate must always be
permitted to introduce new material, it is surely legitimate to object to this as a reply to Woolf
that does not seem to have read her argument.
Even with these peculiarities, Beresford’s text comes closest to a genuine response to
Woolf. Logan Pearsall Smith’s essay, ‘First Catch Your Hare’, may have been encouraged by
Woolf but remains an odd and confusing contribution. He argues that the field of discussion
must be enlarged:
126 As Woolf wrote to Smith, ‘I’m very glad that I goaded you into writing your article, which is worth 25 dozen of
that stupid Mr Beresford’s’. Letters of Virginia Woolf, III, 90 (to Logan Pearsall Smith, 25 February 1924). Woolf and
Smith would later fall out, and Woolf would include a parody of him in Orlando; see Michael H. Whitworth,
‘Logan Pearsall Smith and Orlando’, Review of English Studies, 55 (2004), 598-604.
127 Logan Pearsall Smith, ‘First Catch Your Hare’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 2 February 1924, pp. 629-30 (p. 629).
128 Michael Sadleir, ‘Why Only Dickens?’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 9 February 1924, pp. 667-68 (p. 667).
129 Beresford, ‘The Successors of Charles Dickens’, p. 487.
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112
It isn’t a question merely of English fiction; or, in English fiction, of the Victorians, the Edwardians,
and our contemporary novelists. Indeed, to make sure that one has left no covert unexplored one
should include, I think, not only foreign novels, but the drama, and even the epic.
He argues that in order ‘to arrive at some definite idea of what we mean by character creation
in fiction’ two groups must be recognized.
By far the great majority of them [characters] are stock figures, devoid of any independent
existence. […] But in the works of certain great writers some of the figures (though by no means
all) present a very different appearance. They seem to be framed in a different manner and
composed of other materials, to be real human beings, discoveries and not inventions; they are no
sooner brought into existence that they seem to have always existed: and when the novel is closed,
or the curtain falls upon the drama, they go on living in our imaginations, and are as familiar to us
as our relations and our best-acquainted friends. These are the figures which we call ‘characters’;
and the power of evoking them is what we call ‘character-creation’. It is a power possessed in the
highest degree by Shakespeare; we find it also in Scott, in Jane Austen, in Thackeray; and Dickens
possessed it almost to madness. It is commonly regarded as the greatest gift of these novelists, and
the very essence of their art.130
While a discussion of literary character was indeed a key point of Woolf’s analysis, there is no
sense in Smith’s essay of the question of modern fiction. Indeed, his conclusion is merely to
suggest that English fiction differs greatly from ‘Continental writers’.131
Michael Sadleir, the final participant in this debate, recognizes these problems, naming
Smith as ‘authorized purveyor of red-herrings’. Yet his own sense of the existing debate
contains the same fundamental problems:
As I understand it, the point at issue is whether the modern novelist (which phrase must include
alike Edwardian and Georgian writers) excels or yields to his Victorian forbears in power of
creating fictional character. Just that and no more.132
But can this really be said to be the ‘point at issue’? By conflating the difference between
Edwardian and Georgian novelists, Sadleir renders Woolf’s original dispute with Bennett
entirely inconsequential. Sadleir goes on to make his principal point, which is that ‘neither of
the eminent disputants [Woolf or Beresford] is wholly free from the tendency to speak of the
Victorian novel as though it were epitomized in the works of Dickens and Thackeray’. He
emphasizes the scope of the Victorian novel beyond this pair, mentioning George Eliot and
130 Smith, ‘First Catch Your Hare’, p. 629.
131 Smith, ‘First Catch Your Hare’, p. 630.
132 Sadleir, ‘Why Only Dickens?’, p. 667.
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113
Anthony Trollope. In just the last short paragraph, the modern novel comes into view, and the
conclusion that the form has become ‘gradually emaciated’ and ‘flimsy’.
There can be no doubt whatever that the greater compression or the lighter weight of modern
fiction is due to the limitations of physical space in the printed book and a decline in the habit of
concentration among novel readers.133
This debate has come a long and confusing way from Woolf’s original challenge to Bennett’s
critique of her fiction.
Characterising these responses to Woolf as inadequate in this way has a ring of injustice
to it: it is always possible to hope for a better-informed, better-argued debate, in any context. I
would in no way suggest that these articles are valueless. Beresford’s peculiar remarks on social
change aside, this is a lengthy debate about literature (if not, after Woolf, modern literature) that,
as Sadleir argues, ‘has now for several weeks held the attention of the Nation and Athenaeum
readers’. After Woolf, though, this is not really a debate about the shifting and reforming nature
of modern literature; as responses to Woolf’s claims about the developing face of Georgian
literature, these essays waffle, miss the point, and digress.
Part of this failing might be explained simply by the fact that this is a textual debate,
rather than verbal, personal conversation. When responses are separated by weeks, and formed
as complete prose pieces, rather than as interjections, they necessarily speak to their own
concerns, rather than those of the piece they are supposedly responding to. This being said, this
cautionary note must be understood as relating specifically to the Nation and Athenaeum. Golding
demonstrated well how Anderson, at the Little Review, took considerable care to shape her
periodical into a restless institution that interrogated its own output, consistently encouraging
the possibility of energetic debate. By contrast, as a weekly review, the Nation and Athenaeum is
too respectable, and Leonard Woolf simply not invested enough in his position as literary editor,
for the same to be true of this periodical.
These responses to ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ are thus most interesting as failed
responses to Virginia Woolf. But the lack of energetic debate—à la the Little Review—should not
133 Sadleir, ‘Why Only Dickens?’, p. 667.
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114
be taken as a criticism of the Nation and Athenaeum: part of the importance of weekly reviews is
that they do not behave like modernist little magazines. In her 1924 letter to Logan Pearsall
Smith, Woolf expressed dissatisfaction with Beresford’s response, which one might extend to
frustration with the Nation and Athenaeum itself: this inadequate institution, demanding the
expenditure of time on reviews, and not even providing a good debate. One might plausibly
suggest that at least an element of Woolf’s regret in 1929 was linked to an unrealistic
expectation of a form of debate and conversation—blood & bone of the Woolfs in
Bloomsbury—that a weekly review could never have provided. If the Nation and Athenaeum was,
from Virginia Woolf’s point of view, a sad reminder of what might have been, it may be
necessary to conclude that the Woolfs had taken hold of something that was, essentially, not the
right tool for the job. While the Nation and Athenaeum may have employed Strachey, Clive Bell,
and Fry, it was never a Bloomsbury drawing room, and it is not reasonable to expect it to
behave like one.
Woolf’s regret in 1929 may be understandable, if perhaps not reasonable. But it should
not overshadow the role that the Nation and Athenaeum under Leonard Woolf played in exploring
modernism in Britain in the 1920s. Leonard did not enjoy his work as a literary editor; rather
than driving the Nation and Athenaeum forward to make a particular set of arguments about
literature, he patrolled an oddly neutral space, attempting to prevent the dominant political half
from encroaching any further into his turf. Within this space, a series of critics—many of whom
were interested in the emerging shape of modernist literature—were given the freedom to
review new books, to think on how literary experiments might be linked and conceptualized, to
explore how the old models of literature were being found inadequate. The Nation and Athenaeum
was entirely a weekly review, invested in the calm book review, and in official culture; in its own
way, it was also quietly radical. From and within and between the free play of these book
reviews, modernism emerged into public culture, explored if not embraced by a magazine that
insisted on taking it seriously. In the next chapter, I turn, for contrast, to a very different
THE NATION AND ATHENAEUM, 1923-30
115
magazine, one that Leonard Woolf described as ‘conservative’.134 If the Nation and Athenaeum
allowed critics a space to explore new literature, how did a magazine of the Spectator’s ilk
negotiate a relationship with modernism?
134 Leonard Woolf, ‘The World of Books: The Revolt Against Europe’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 20 August 1927, p.
666.
116
3. THE SPECTATOR, 1925-32
In the early years of his editorship of the Spectator, Evelyn Wrench attempted to employ a war
hero as a reviewer. He suggested that his literary editor, Francis Yeats-Brown, invite T. E.
Lawrence to review some books on the Middle East. When the idea was first put to him in April
1926, Lawrence demurred. Asked again the following year—while he was stationed in
Karachi—he replied giving details of his reluctance to write.
Your letter arrived duly: and has been thought out: but I can’t imagine what sort of a reception
you’d give to the only sort of stuff I’d consider writing: I’ll never again use the name Lawrence: nor
allow anything I write to be connected in any way with the reputation I made as Lawrence. Nor
will I ever write upon the Middle East, or upon any political subject. Nor upon archaeology.
If you want poems reviewed, anonymously, or literature (biography, criticism, novels of the XXth
Cent. sort of Forsters, Joyces, D. H. Lawrences etc) at an interval of three months from the
fountain head:—but of course you don’t…1
If all these conditions are met, he would be ‘delighted’ to review. Lawrence’s perspective on
modern literature and the Spectator is revealing. He portrays himself as a reader of a particular
type of modern literature, and while he does not give a name to the ‘sort of’ thing that interests
him, it can fairly be called modernist: Forster, Lawrence, Joyce ‘etc’. Crucially, this group is
readily identifiable and supposed to be outside the Spectator’s purview. Borrowing the vague
language that Lawrence favours, it is not a magazine involved in that sort of thing. The Spectator
is not compatible with the serious critical discussion of modernist texts.
In this instance, Lawrence was incorrect. The Spectator was happy for him to review and
recommend modernist literature: Yeats-Brown sent a packet of three novels by D. H. Lawrence
to Karachi. These arrived on 6 July. Two days later, Lawrence wrote to Yeats-Brown,
enclosing a review. He continued his previous line of thought: little faith in his own writing
1 Evelyn Wrench, Francis Yeats-Brown: 1886-1944 (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1948), pp. 130-31. The surviving
correspondence between Lawrence and Yeats-Brown is reproduced in Wrench’s biography of Yeats-Brown, his
cousin. The original letters are preserved in Wrench’s papers; see London, British Library (BL), Wrench Papers,
Add MS 59548. Lawrence’s refusal to ‘use the name Lawrence’ refers to his re-enlistment in the armed forces
under an assumed name. He first tried ‘John Hume Ross’ in 1922; after this was exposed, he joined the Army as
‘Thomas Edward Shaw’ in 1923. In 1925, Lawrence transferred to the RAF and sailed for Karachi on 7
December 1926. See Michael Korda, Hero: The Life & Legend of Lawrence of Arabia (London: Aurum Press, 2012), pp.
535-43, 577-78, 605, 618-24.
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ability (‘As for the note, of course it’s no good’) and less in the Spectator’s reception of his writing
(‘I don’t expect you to like what I write’).2 The article was published under the pseudonym ‘C.
D.’ on 6 August.3 One wonders if Lawrence, having been given the approval to write the review,
was attempting to push what boundaries he could find. His review makes no mention of
Lawrence’s experiments with explicitness (commonplace in reviews of Lawrence at this time),
instead simply praising the ‘rich depth and strangeness and fine artistry of the author’. He even
quotes, utterly straight-faced, two stanzas of the poem ‘Ballad of a Wilful Woman’, including
the lines ‘While a naked man comes swiftly | Like a spurt of white foam’.4 Lawrence would
write four further pieces for the Spectator under this pseudonym, on a range of texts from
Hakluyt to H. G. Wells.5 He remained despondent in his letters to Yeats-Brown about his skill
as critic and his compatibility with the Spectator.6
Was Lawrence wrong about the Spectator? When approached by Wrench and Yeats-
Brown, he presumes that this magazine has a certain taste in literature: the clarity of this
presumption is striking. Even if the reality proved to be more complex, the vision is instructive.
The Spectator could be taken to defend tradition in literature, and oppose innovation; to take a
cultural stance that is most simply described as conservative—although as I shall later suggest,
cultural conservatism is itself not simple at all.
I do not intend to claim the Spectator as an unexpected advocate of experimental
modernist texts. Instead, I will first suggest that the conservative rejection of modernism that
2 Wrench, Francis Yeats-Brown, pp. 132-33.
3 Yeats-Brown had suggested that a new name might be ‘amusing’ to create. Lawrence took ‘Colindale’, the last
Underground station he had visited, split it to make ‘Colin Dale’ and reduced this to initials. Wrench, Francis Yeats-
Brown, pp. 131-2.
4 [T. E. Lawrence], ‘D. H. Lawrence's Novels’, The Spectator, 6 August 1927, p. 223. ‘Ballad of a Wilful Woman’
was first published in 1917 in Lawrence’s collection Look! We Have Come Through!
5 [T. E. Lawrence], ‘Mixed Biscuits’, The Spectator, 20 August 1927, pp. 290-91; [T. E. Lawrence], ‘A Critic of
Critics Criticized’, The Spectator, 27 August 1927, pp. 321-22; [T. E. Lawrence], ‘Hakluyt—First Naval
Propagandist’, The Spectator, 10 September 1927, pp. 390-91; [T. E. Lawrence], ‘The Wells Short Stories’, The
Spectator, 25 February 1928, pp. 268-69.
6 ‘Here’s another poor scribble’, on 14 July; ‘I write such miserable stuff’, 18 August. On 6 September, he
commented again on how unsuitable D. H. Lawrence was for the Spectator: ‘The reading of that attempt to interest
your readers in D. H. Lawrence was worse, as a show-up of my dumbness as a critic, even than anticipated. I’m
sorry’. On 13 October, a drafted review of E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel was ‘not good enough for the Spectator’.
He ends that letter by suggesting ‘You should have torn up my Guedella review’; this refers to his article of 27
August. See Wrench, Francis Yeats-Brown, pp. 132-6.
THE SPECTATOR, 1925-32
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Lawrence identifies as natural to the Spectator must be taken seriously, and was a crucial factor
in modernism’s emergence into public culture. Taking this cultural perspective seriously entails
attention to the distinctive conservative ideology associated with the Spectator: the same ideology
that Lawrence was so quick to recognize. The Spectator had an institutional ideology unlike any
other magazine studied here, and this significantly influences its reading of modernist texts.
Finally, I contend that this ideology—a curious blend of conservatism, independence, and a
studied idiosyncrasy—is able not merely to evaluate modernism, but to do so in a way that
transforms it. The Spectator makes a modernism it is able to comprehend and appreciate.
Sometimes, this conservative refashioning of modernism can provoke intriguing, unexpected
readings of modernism. Sometimes, I suggest, it can distort and distend the literature that the
Spectator attempts to analyse.
While the Spectator’s ideology might set it apart, like the other chapters in this thesis this
reading of the Spectator begins with an important shift in its history. It covers the short editorship
of Evelyn Wrench, from 1925 to 1932. Wrench came into journalism in the first years of the
twentieth century, working as a private secretary for Alfred Harmsworth. He was a passionate
imperialist, and founded the Overseas League and English Speaking Union (both of which still
exist today).7 In 1922, he joined the Spectator staff in a corporate (rather than editorial) role as
Managing Director. Apparently, this was at the direct suggestion of Joe St. Loe Strachey, the
previous editor. Wrench took over the position of Editor-in-Chief on 1 January 1925, with an
option to buy the paper outright (which he exercised within a few months).8 He bought a paper
that had previously been closely associated with an influential, long term editor—Strachey—
who had edited and owned the paper for twenty-seven years. 1925 might therefore be seen to
offer the prospect of significant change for the Spectator.
It was, however, a very different periodical to either the Nation and Athenaeum or Time and
Tide. Both magazines were, in their current formats, brand new. Even if continuity is drawn
7 See DNB.
8 Wrench, Francis Yeats-Brown, p. 90.
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119
between Keynes’ Nation and Athenaeum in 1923 and Massingham’s Nation in 1907, that magazine
was barely adolescent. When Keynes took over the Nation from Massingham, he was replacing
the Nation’s founding and only editor. Wrench may have had large shoes to fill, but Strachey’s
tenure at the Spectator—twice as long as Massingham’s at the Nation—was only a quarter of the
Spectator’s lifetime. Three years into Wrench’s editorship, in 1928, the Spectator celebrated its
centenary. Its first issue, published the week ending 5 July 1828, opened by discussing the
invasion of Bulgaria in the Russo-Turkish war.9 Under Evelyn Wrench, electoral reform would
allow all men and women over the age of 21 to vote in elections. In 1828, the government of
the day under the Duke of Wellington had been elected with the votes of 3% of adult males.10
Impressively, Wrench’s editorship represented only the fourth transfer of editorial control in the
paper’s ninety-seven years. The paper’s first editor, Robert S. Rintoul, was in his post for thirty
years. Strachey’s predecessors, Meredith Townsend and Richard Holt Hutton, managed almost
forty years as joint editors.11
The Spectator figures large in the cultural history of the weekly review, and is central to
the very idea of this type of magazine. As discussed briefly in the Introduction, its foundation in
1828 sets out many of the features of the weekly review that would be maintained to the early
twentieth century, and even to the present day: a weekly discussion of political and cultural
material, with a clear division between the two. More importantly, perhaps, individuals
involved with other magazines were aware of this historical role: when weekly magazines as
genre are considered, the Spectator is consistently used as a yardstick. One can place too much
emphasis on a birthday tribute—it is hardly likely to criticize—but it remains significant that on
the occasion of the Spectator’s centenary in 1928, the Nation and Athenaeum would describe it as ‘a
9 ‘The News of the Week’, The Spectator, 5 July 1828, p. 1.
10 Based on figures for England and Wales. See Derek Beales, ‘The Electorate Before and After 1832: the Right to
Vote, and the Opportunity’, Parliamentary History, 11 (1992), 139-50 (p. 147).
11 Richard D. Fulton, ‘Spectator, The’, in British Literary Magazines: The Romantic Age, 1789-1836, ed. by Alvin
Sullivan (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1983), pp. 391-98 (p. 398). For a more in-depth history of the magazine, see
William Beach Thomas, The Story of the Spectator, 1828-1928 (London: Methuen, 1928). This was commissioned for
the magazine’s centenary, so is an uncritical celebration of the Spectator. Edward Hyams produced a similar volume
to celebrate fifty years of the New Statesman, discussed in Chapter 5.
THE SPECTATOR, 1925-32
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timeless institution, like the City Corporation, the Bank of England, and the House of Lords. It
is strange to realize that, until a hundred years ago, Britain had to muddle along somehow
without the weekly discipline of the Spectator’.12
This ‘weekly discipline’ could be celebrated, as here, or rebelled against, but it was ever
present. Time and Tide’s first editorial refers to the failings of a Press ‘bred for the most part in
Victorian or Edwardian days’; a later speech by Rhondda on the nature of her paper names the
key weekly reviews: ‘The Nation, The Spectator, The New Statesman, The Saturday Review, and our own
Time and Tide’.13 What emerges from these twin conceptions of the weekly periodical press is the
image of the long-lived, archetypal, conservative forebear, of which the Spectator is the most
influential example: old enough, as it happens, to be not even Edwardian or Victorian but
Georgian. When the Nation and Athenaeum circulated monthly reports on the paper’s advertising
and circulation to its board, it provided comparative figures for the New Statesman, a politically
aligned competitor with which it would eventually merge, and, of course, the Spectator.14 When
the BBC first proposed to publish their own weekly review, they imagined ‘a weekly review of
the ordinary type, or in other words, a “BBC Spectator”’.15 The new periodical’s name—the
Listener—was chosen because it was ‘reminiscent of “The Spectator”’.16 When New Statesman
editor Kingsley Martin described the weekly reviews in his autobiography (albeit referring to
the 1930s) he wrote that ‘everyone took it for granted that the Spectator held the leading place. It
was a very old-fashioned journal and assumed a somewhat superior air’.17 This periodical is not
merely old, it provides an archetypal model against which other examples of the genre—
especially new magazines seeking to enter an established marketplace—can measure themselves.
12 ‘“The Spectator”’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 3 November 1928, pp. 168-69 (p. 168).
13 ‘Time and Tide’, Time and Tide, 14 May 1920, p. 4; Margaret Haig Thomas and Rebecca West, ‘The Function
of the Weekly Review’, Time and Tide, 9 December 1927, pp. 1114-15 (p. 1114).
14 Cambridge, King's College Special Collections (KCSC), J. M. Keynes Papers, NS/4/1-2.
15 Caversham, BBC Written Archives Centre (WAC), Publications: The Listener, R43/60/1 (K. Edwin, ‘The
Listener’).
16 WAC, R43/60/1 (Nicolls to Murray, 25 October 1927).
17 Kingsley Martin, Editor: A Second Volume of Autobiography, 1931-45 (London: Hutchinson, 1968), p. 13.
THE SPECTATOR, 1925-32
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And as T. E. Lawrence well recognized, this archetype tended to treat the concept of
modernism with caution.
*
In many important ways, Lawrence had the measure of the Spectator. This was certainly
not an institution that was enamoured by modernist writing, and the Spectator would commonly
identify modernist texts and traits only to denigrate their importance or lasting value. However,
I suggest that such moments can play an important role in modernism’s developing public
presence. In 1927, the periodical published a short, unsigned review of Laura Riding and
Robert Graves’s A Survey of Modernist Poetry, now often mentioned as one of the first texts to
concretely link ‘modernist’ with the experimental poetry of the first decades of the twentieth
century.18 But the Spectator remains deeply unsure about the value of this critical text, and the
value of the literature it assesses. The review is quoted in full.
It is not easy to see what Mr Robert Graves and Miss Laura Riding hoped for in writing this book.
In part, it is an attempt to gain the sympathy of the ‘plain man’ for some sophisticated American-
English fashions in poetry: in part it is an attempt to explain why no ‘plain man’ can expect to
sympathize with them—they are addressed ‘to the university’, rather than to him. And their
exposition itself seems to deny the need of any such attempts: they tell us that the aim of such
writers is not in the least degree communication; but that they are much more engaged in
commenting to themselves mockingly on the fact that they are writing poetry. Perhaps the best
chapter in this book is the one which describes the attitude of mind implicit in ‘modernism’; the
pretence that one belongs to a ‘lost generation’, in which all standards and all tradition have
vanished, and the poet is left as a dead soul laughing a little sourly at himself for being so dead. It
would be simple to see in such a posture an infinitely regressive involution of fright and self-pity;
but the authors would like us to observe the complexity of the involution, sympathize with it, and
even admire it. They will find converts among the converted; or perhaps ‘not even that’, for then
self-mockery would be at an end.19
One sees echoes of Sylvia Lynd’s criticisms of Woolf, though the Spectator’s review lacks even the
question of potential. The modernist poetry that Riding and Graves explore so carefully is
dismissed as ‘some sophisticated American-English fashions’. The nature of this attack is
important. As Faye Hammill has demonstrated, the value of ‘sophistication’ was in transition at
this time. Where writers in the nineteenth century had tended to understand sophistication as
morally questionable, in the twenties and thirties the term became more closely and positively
18 For example, see Ástráður Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), p. 86.
19 ‘Current Literature’, The Spectator, 24 December 1927, p. 1132.
THE SPECTATOR, 1925-32
122
associated with urban modernity and—to a certain extent—modernism.20 The Spectator thus not
only orients itself against modernism, but pushes back against the concept of sophistication as
positive attribute. Here, it clearly associates modernism with the older, negative connotations of
sophistication: ‘forbidden knowledge’, an opposition to ‘consensual public morality’, ‘illness and
death’ via consumption, ‘sexual desire and the maturing body’.21 Put another way: falseness,
fragility, urbanity, effeminacy, irrelevance.
Modernism is, ultimately, a fashion: it does not offer meaningful or historically
significant change, but the products of a new season that will, very soon, be superseded.
Crucially, this review takes key terms used by Riding and Graves and places them into
quotation marks: ‘plain man’, ‘lost generation’, ‘modernism’. Riding and Graves do not use
marks around these terms. Take their first sentence:
It must be assumed for the moment that poetry not characteristically ‘modernist’ presents no
difficulty to the plain reader; for the complaint against modernist poetry turns on its differences
from traditional poetry.22
Plain reader is used here and throughout the rest of the book (note that Riding and Graves’s
term is gender neutral). ‘Modernist’ is placed in inverted commas in the first clause, but these
are dropped for the second one and do not reappear. ‘Lost generation’ appears in Chapter 9,
directly attributed to Hemingway in the famous epigraph to The Sun Also Rises, and following
this is used without quotation marks.23 The presence of the marks of course indicates that the
validity of the term introduced by Riding and Graves is held to be questionable. If Riding and
Graves are arguing for the importance of modernist poetry, the Spectator is pushing back against
the classification itself.
If, following my use of Ian Hacking, discussions of modernist texts in weekly magazines
represent modernism itself emerging into the light, the Spectator here takes the classification and
20 Faye Hammill, Sophistication: a Literary and Cultural History (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010), pp. 117-
19.
21 Hammill, Sophistication: a Literary and Cultural History, pp. 66-67.
22 Laura Riding and Robert Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry and A Pamphlet Against Anthologies, ed. by Charles
Mundye and Patrick McGuinness (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2002), p. 5.
23 That is, ‘“You are all a lost generation”—Gertrude Stein, in conversation.’ See Riding and Graves, A Survey, p.
111.
THE SPECTATOR, 1925-32
123
attempts to push it back into the dark. Modernism is not a significant cultural development that
demands to be understood, but only a fashion. This periodical’s desire to deny validity to
modernism is only partially successful. Indeed, perhaps one of the most striking aspects of this
review to a modern reader is that it is so familiar. Modernism lacks any form of moral
backbone or serious endeavour, associated with ‘pretence’, sour laughter, ‘fright and self-pity’,
mocking commentary. Modernism offers only ‘involution’, is always reflexive and thinks only of
itself. These are criticisms that any reader of modernist literature will have encountered. Note,
for example, certain similarities between this 1927 review and John Carey’s 1992 invective
against modernism, The Intellectuals and the Masses.
I would suggest […] that the principle around which modernist literature and culture fashioned
themselves was the exclusion of the masses, the defeat of their power, the removal of their literacy,
the denial of their humanity.24
That this review can be understood as a generalized attack on modernism signifies because—as
is often remarked—the modernist poetry that Riding and Graves were promoting was
idiosyncratic, and attuned to Riding’s poetic agenda in particular. For example, e. e. cummings
is presented the most representative of modernist poets, Riding’s own poetry is quoted (without
attribution) as a model for discussion, and Ezra Pound is hardly discussed at all.
This is not, of course, a criticism of the Survey itself: critical idiosyncrasies are always
apparent in hindsight. Instead, it suggests that the Spectator’s review of A Survey has the effect of
flattening out those idiosyncrasies. In its attempt to condemn Riding and Graves’s promotion of
their modernist poetry, the Spectator refers to a wider concept of modernism. It is notable that
the review places ‘modernism’ in quotation marks, whereas Riding and Graves—though they
do use that word—prefer the term ‘modernist’, which they almost invariably use with ‘poetry’.
Where A Survey tends to stick to the specific literary form in question, the review generalizes and
looks outward to the wider movement.
24 John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia (London: Faber and
Faber, 1992), p. 21.
THE SPECTATOR, 1925-32
124
In other words, in reviewing this very particular discussion of poetry, the Spectator
discusses modernism itself. Even as it attempts to deny validity to modernism, the periodical
cannot help but set the concept up as a publicly contested idea. Towards the end of the review,
the Spectator writes that ‘the authors would like us to observe the complexity of the involution,
sympathize with it, and even admire it’. Here, they are not so much questioning the existence of
modernism as challenging the characteristics that (they suggest) Riding and Graves assign to it:
an ‘involution of fright and self-pity’. At this moment—and perhaps only for a moment—
modernism appears as a concrete force in public culture, even as it is contested. But as I have
suggested, this appearance follows directly from the way in which this review represents Riding
and Graves’s arguments. Therefore, it is neither recognition of cultural fact (a situation in
which anyone can see what modernism is, and the Spectator does not like it) nor entirely obscure
(a situation in which no Spectator reader would understand what was under discussion). Rather,
it is at moments such as this that the concept of modernism emerges into public culture.
Crucially, the Spectator’s review plays this role even though it would prefer to dismiss
modernism altogether. Indeed, one might quite mischievously suggest that that very dislike is
closely related to the important transformation of Riding and Graves’s modernist poetry into
the review’s more general modernism; that a more in-depth or positive review might have paid
greater attention to the Survey’s idiosyncrasies. Although further examples of just such a
generalizing approach to modernism are commonplace, the review of A Survey is extraordinary
in its direct focus on the label and qualities of modernism. Given the nature of the text under
review, this is perhaps not surprising.
Nevertheless, considering a wider range of examples is revealing. The Spectator will
sometimes use the vaguest possible language to indicate the presence of modernist writers or
texts: Fannie Hurst’s Appassionata (1926) is poorly received and compared to Joyce and Stein.
THE SPECTATOR, 1925-32
125
Miss Hurst is a clever writer […] But there are signs that she has been over-impressed by a certain
school of writers who are in every sense the worst models for others, whatever literary merit they
may in themselves possess—novelists like James Joyce and the inimitably absurd Gertrude Stein.25
Turning to the first pages of Hurst’s novel, one can see what is gestured at:
‘Y-a-w-n’, said Laura, and all her muscles ran out and flexed for her to that instant ecstatic rigidity
and then shimmered back again, neatly and exactly into place.
That was it! To yawn as Laura yawned made you shiver with the ecstasy of the flesh….
Then you dozed off again. So easily. Like the great cat that curled up again surely into its design.26
At this moment on the first page, the narrative moves from observing Laura in third person to
an attempt to link her perspective directly to the reader in second person. Indeed, most of the
novel is written in second person. One might argue that this narration is not wholly successful;
the separation hinted at between ‘Laura’ and you’ in phrases such as ‘To yawn as Laura
yawned made you shiver’ is unclear. However, it is certainly a narrative style influenced by
modernist experimentation; as Randall Stevenson puts it ‘heightened concern with individual,
subjective consciousness’.27
As with Riding and Graves, however, the Spectator review does not focus on exploring
the exact nature of these experiments but generalizes. We are not given a great deal of evidence
of the ‘signs’ of her association with modernism, but instead some members of a ‘certain school’.
That use of ‘certain’ is akin to a knowing wink: the shared qualities of this school of Joyce and
Stein are assumed to be known without the need for explication. Again, vague generalization is
used to avoid serious and careful discussion of modernist fiction, but one effect of this is to
imply that the specific characteristics of this ‘certain school’ are public knowledge. This cannot
help but give greater public weight to the concept of modernism itself.
E. F. Benson writes in a similar way with just a touch more detail in 1927: literature is
described as ‘what we may call the “jazz” of the present day’.28 Again, the tone is knowing,
25 ‘[‘Appassionata’. By Fanny Hurst]’, The Spectator, 17 April 1926, p. 730.The author’s name is misspelled by the
Spectator as ‘Fanny’ Hurst.
26 Fannie Hurst, Appassionata (London: Jonathan Cape, 1926), p. 1.
27 Randall Stevenson, Modernist Fiction: An Introduction, rev. edn (Harlow: Pearson Education, 1998), p. 2. Notably,
this aspect of modernist fiction is Stevenson’s opening example, and is drawn from two very early critics: R. A.
Scott James’s Modernism and Romance (1908) and Elizabeth Drew’s The Modern Novel (1926).
28 E. F. Benson, ‘A Notable First Novel’, The Spectator, 10 September 1927, pp. 392-95 (p. 392).
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assuming that the reader will easily recognize that which is under discussion. Here, the use of
‘what we may call’ makes the same gesture as ‘certain school’, but pushes it a little further: it is
assumed that something exists to be named, and quite playfully supplies a name transplanted
from music. There is, in this instance, slightly more detail. W. Seymour Leslie’s The Silent Queen
is not referring to ‘the torrid round of night-clubs, cocktails, and pink legs’, but ‘the true jazz of
the present day, the squeals and broken rhythms and general monkey-tricks of the mind and
spirit’.29 Again, the text itself does bear the comparison, even if it is hardly modernist prose par
excellence.
The shutter of memory opens and reveals a perambulator adventuring the north-west passage
amid mud-splashed omnibuses hauled by steaming foam-flecked horses, and hansoms and
carriages containing real ladies and silk-hatted gentlemen. All this animation arrested by a
policeman’s hand that the frail craft may pass over to the corner of our street, which reached, there
is heard a thunder of hoofs, and the slow-motion traffic of a vanished London rolls once more
forward. As the perambulator tips up the front-door steps, a German band explodes with a terrible
gaiety into Tarara-boom-deay.30
Rather than offering a close analysis of the exact association between ‘jazz’ and Leslie’s novel,
the review depends upon the reader’s ability to infer. It imagines that knowledge of the ‘jazz of
the present day’ is commonly understood and that readers would be easily able to see how such
experiments might be applied to literature. The term ‘modernism’ may not be in play, but these
reviews nevertheless continue to develop a sense of a certain form of modern experimental
prose fiction as a matter of common public knowledge.
Terms that approach modernism do appear, though rarely. An early publication by
Stephen Spender, in 1929, again uses quotation marks to play with a label, writing of ‘the
experiments of the “moderns”’.31 More common, however, are labels that speak of forced,
artificial, or unnecessary modernity. Austin Clarke refers to Joyce, Eliot, Huxley and Sitwell as
‘the more advanced writers of the day’ in 1926.32 It is difficult not to read this as an
advancement beyond what is natural. J. B. Priestley’s review of Edith Wharton’s The Writing of
29 Benson, ‘A Notable First Novel’, p. 392.
30 W. Seymour Leslie, The Silent Queen (London: Jonathan Cape, 1927), pp. 10-11.
31 Stephen Spender, ‘The Problems of Poet and Public’, The Spectator, 3 August 1929, pp. 152-53 (p. 152).
32 Austin Clarke, ‘Interpretations and Intuitions’, The Spectator, 4 December 1926, Literary Supplement, p. 1026.
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Fiction in 1925 writes of ‘the ultra-subjective, the “stream-of-consciousness” novels that are so
fashionable at the moment’.33 The connotations of the prefix ‘ultra-’ were discussed in relation
to Thomas Moult’s reviews in Chapter 1; similarly, Priestley offers little detail on what is being
discussed—merely suggesting that one detail, the ‘subjective’, has been taken too far—but
presumes the reader knows what is being discussed. This dismissal of a ‘fashion’ in novels
develops, by implication, the sense that the stream-of-consciousness novel is a matter of
common knowledge. In addition (and just as for Moult), the use of ultra- implies the possibility
of a modernity that might, actually, seem more legitimate to the Spectator. To criticize the ‘ultra-
subjective’ raises the possibility of a subjective novel that is not excessive.
In this light, more positive understandings of modern literature are often curious.
Amabel Williams-Ellis, reviewing Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown, describes Virginia Woolf as ‘one of
the best of our modern “mystic realist” novelists’.34 ‘Our modern […] novelists’ again works
towards that unsaid recognition of modernism, but the qualification of novelists with ‘mystic
realist’—again, in quotation marks—is problematic. It is an attempt to conceptualize Woolf’s
work, but borders on the bizarre. The source of Williams-Ellis’s terms is hard to trace; naming
a novelist a realist is clearly a relatively safe form of praise, and might in Woolf’s case be related
specifically to Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown. As was discussed at length in the previous chapter
(albeit in terms of the earlier, periodical version), one of the arguments made in Mr Bennett and
Mrs Brown is an attempt to frame Woolf’s fiction as a new evolution of realism, another way to
catch Mrs Brown.
‘Mystic’ is trickier. Leigh Wilson’s recent Modernism and Magic (2012) boldly argues that
‘modernism drew on discussions of the occult […] because it saw in them the possibilities for a
reconceptualization of the mimetic’.35 In this context, Williams-Ellis’s deployment of ‘mystic’ is
intriguing, but the use of this term in the Spectator seems not so much to link modernism and
33 J. B. Priestley, ‘The Novelist's Art’, The Spectator, 5 December 1925, p. 1047.
34 Amabel Williams-Ellis, ‘Books of the Moment: Seven Books of Essays’, The Spectator, 10 January 1925, p. 47 (p.
47).
35 Leigh Wilson, Modernism and Magic (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), p. 1.
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magic but to link Woolf with mysticism. As Wilson notes, the early twentieth century did
experience ‘an occult revival’ rooted in the late nineteenth century.36 A mystic Woolf might
therefore be a way for the Spectator to understand Woolf’s works as developing in a tradition,
rather than turning away from one. That this mooted classification is both unusual and
problematic—surely Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown argues strongly for a turn away from a certain
tradition—is highly significant. Rather than leaving modernism unspoken, the Spectator is here
generating its own terms of reference for new literature.
*
I assign this act of generation to the Spectator itself. Part of the reason that I am able to
do this is that several of the texts discussed above—especially the crucial review of A Survey of
Modernist Poetry—are anonymous. However, it should be acknowledged that the presence (or
lack) of a name on the byline changes how descriptions of modernism are discussed. ‘Mystic
realist’ is quite clearly Amabel Williams-Ellis’s term. I continue to speak of the Spectator
generating such terms in order to emphasize the particular importance of institutional identity
for this magazine, over and above the other periodicals considered by this thesis.
As I argued in the Introduction, Bakhtin’s dialogic understanding of novels can imply
that a periodical can be modelled as a structuring stylistic unity for the texts within it. The
question of how individual reviews interacted with and reacted to modernist literature must
always be understood in the context of the institution they were writing for, and the case of the
Spectator—long-lived, prestigious, conservative—was very different from other magazines. This
periodical exhibits a sense of its own unified and stable identity unlike other weekly reviews.
Returning briefly to that first example of T. E. Lawrence’s letter, he professes to know exactly
what the Spectator will think of his values. Even though he was mistaken, the clarity of his
assumption is striking. Therefore, the way in which this magazine approaches and interrogates
36 Wilson, Modernism and Magic, p. 1.
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modernism must be understood in the context of the magazine’s strong and unusual
institutional identity; or, as I will be referring to it throughout, the ideology of the Spectator itself.
Evidence for the particular and distinctive strength of this ideology abounds. An
understanding of the values of a modernist magazine is often explored by way of the editor, not
least because many of the most important periodicals for modernism were closely associated
with particular editors. As has been well rehearsed in histories of little magazines, many if not
all of the first periodicals to publish modernist texts were associated with charismatic and
influential editors: Harriet Monroe at Poetry, Margaret Anderson at the Little Review, Wyndham
Lewis at BLAST, John Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansfield at Rhythm, to take only four
of the most famous examples. Ian Hamilton—himself, not coincidentally, an editor—subtitled
his study of little magazines ‘A Study of Six Editors’.37 While most of these editors came to
prominence in the 1910s, Brooker and Thacker argue that the 1920s saw in Britain ‘the
emergence of a generation of editors, T. S. Eliot, John Middleton Murry, Edgell Rickword, and
Desmond MacCarthy, as figures of standing and influence’.38
The Spectator’s editorial history appears similar. The modernist little magazine did not,
after all, invent the figure of the charismatic, powerful, domineering editor who comes to stand,
metonymically, for the magazine itself. This chapter covers the editorship of Evelyn Wrench,
who as discussed above had the unenviable task of following the acclaimed twenty-seven year
career of John St Loe Strachey, usually known as St Loe. By all accounts, St Loe carried
significant political influence in his own person, as his daughter, Amabel Williams-Ellis,
suggested.
The party manipulators knew that father [St Loe] was honest and believed him talented. The
Spectator was still exceedingly influential […] He believed himself a Whig, a cross-bencher, a broad
churchman, an independent, and Oliver Cromwell was one of his heroes. For many years, week by
week, on one question or another, Government and Opposition statesman had courted him when
they needed support.39
37 Ian Hamilton, The Little Magazines: A Study of Six Editors (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1976).
38 The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, ed. by Peter Brooker and others, 3 vols (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2009-2013), I, 339.
39 Amabel Williams-Ellis, All Stracheys Are Cousins: Memoirs (London: Weidenfield and Nicolson, 1983), p. 83.
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One of the more insidious consequences of this personal control—like Wrench after him, St
Loe was both editor and proprietor—was a microscopic, censorial influence over the paper’s
material, extending from the unsigned leaders to material supposedly written by other
contributors. James Strachey suggests that he provided ‘detailed instructions about what was to
be written in the leader, the sermon or the review concerned’, and corrected proofs. ‘He altered
a word here and there, he scribbled a fresh sentence in the margin, he struck out a whole
paragraph and replaced it by one of his own’.40 James Strachey further suggests that Lytton
Strachey’s later contributions to the magazine were written in full and conscious awareness of
this editorial pen: that Strachey curbed his own style in order to pre-empt St Loe’s alterations.
To an extent, then, St Loe was a powerful and influential editor who shared key
characteristics with the editors of modernist little magazines. But the majority of those editors
founded or transformed their periodicals, moulding them to express their agendas. There was
no Criterion without Eliot. Accounts of St Loe’s career also emphasize the level of his influence
on the paper, but suggest that he was able to exert this influence because he was—almost
serendipitously—so closely aligned with the paper’s ideology. One of two full-page obituaries
for St Loe emphasized that the previous editors saw him as a natural successor.
From 1886 onward the Spectator became the pivot of his life. Long before his position on the Paper
was known to outsiders, while he was still only writing weekly leaders, and ‘supplying’, for each
editor in turn, he knew the Spectator would eventually be his. Richard Hutton and Meredith
Townsend, among their intimates, spoke of him as the heir-apparent, before he had completed his
first year’s work.41
St Loe did not seize control, but was found to be worthy of it: he and the Spectator prospered.
Amabel Williams-Ellis discusses the end of Strachey’s tenure: she recalls that she and
her brother, the (future) Labour politician John Strachey, were originally expected to inherit the
Spectator when their father (St Loe) retired. As it became clear that John’s left-wing principles
were not a youthful fad, however, this inheritance was called into question.
40 James Strachey, ‘Introduction’, in Lytton Strachey, Spectatorial Essays, ed. by James Strachey (London: Chatto &
Windus, 1964), pp. 8-9.
41 ‘Amicus’, ‘John St Loe Strachey’, The Spectator, 3 September 1927, Special Supplement, p. ii.
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It was plain that the Spectator could not become socialist and live, though John did contribute a few
Leftist articles. John knew that, however sympathetic and kind father might be, he ultimately had
to be disinherited because of his new left-wing convictions.42
That notion of the Spectator ‘living’ is at once a simple, metaphorical acknowledgement of the
relentless periodicity of a weekly magazine—it must always go on producing, week by week—
and a reference to an idea of the Spectator that St Loe—and John Strachey—had to be measured
against. A new editor must match up to the paper’s own, distinctive, ideology.
When that new editor did take over the paper, he not only emphasized a reliance on the
ideology of the paper, but suggested that his own editorial style was less than dictatorial.
Writing of St Loe’s legacy, Evelyn Wrench argued that ‘his public spirit, his enthusiasm for
great causes and readiness to accept ideas, were an inspiration to all who came in contact with
him. The torch he handed to us we were determined to carry worthily’.43 Note the shift from
singular to plural as Strachey leaves and Wrench takes over. Similarly, Wrench describes staff
meetings, where the magazine was worked up, as ‘informal gatherings, where there was
complete freedom of speech, sparks used to fly, for the political views of the staff varied’.44 St
Loe’s strong influence on the paper may have been partially enabled by his close alliance to the
ideology of the Spectator, but when Wrench takes over even this personal influence is lessened,
and the editorial team sees itself as relying more heavily on the ‘torch’ passed from one hand to
the next, the values of the paper. The Spectator, then, manifests as a stable institution with a
distinct ideology: very different, of course, to a modernist little magazine but also different to
the other magazines under discussion by this thesis, all of which were far younger and none of
which exhibit such a clear awareness of their long-maintained ideological values.
Discerning precisely what those values were is often difficult. The Spectator of course
lacks a manifesto-like statement of its aims and ideals, so common to little magazines. This is
not to say that it had none, merely that it did not lay them out clearly. This problem is well
illustrated by a letter written to Evelyn Wrench by Francis Yeats-Brown towards the end of
42 Williams-Ellis, All Stracheys Are Cousins, pp. 83-84.
43 Wrench, Francis Yeats-Brown, p. 91.
44 Wrench, Francis Yeats-Brown, p. 91.
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Wrench’s tenure as editor. Wrench was looking for a successor, and Yeats-Brown puts himself
forward, although only half-heartedly. He does not seem to want the job. Yeats-Brown was
perhaps aware that Wrench did not favour him for this particular position; Wrench would later
write that ‘I never had any intention of entrusting him with the political side of the paper, as I
did not consider his judgment reliable’.45 Writing to Wrench, however, Yeats-Brown did make
one central claim for his candidacy.
I do believe that I know that the Spectator readers think and want, having been a leisured
Spectator reader myself for longer than most journalists. This is not conceit: it is merely that my
mind really does work with theirs. I should very rarely want to discuss what Spectator readers
would think about anything, for I believe I know, from 20 years experience.46
Frustratingly, there is little detail on what Spectator readers want: merely the assertion that it is
something readily comprehended by the right candidate for the job. Perhaps that vagueness
signifies, and the nature of the Spectator’s ideology is best accessed from the side, as it were; from
small moments rather than explicit statements.
One of these moments is a comparison, in the 1928 centenary issue, of the
contemporary Spectator with its nineteenth-century self. Two of the paper’s most famous editors
were Meredith Townsend and Richard Hutton (joint editors 1861-97), and they were imagined
as spectral presences in the modern offices of the Spectator.
Things have been changing since their time; above all, ways of thinking and speaking have been
changing. […] But we think they would not feel strangers in the editorial room together, Hutton
first, adjusting his eye-glass, Townsend behind him, grasping his snuff-box.47
This does not suggest that the Spectator was ignorant of modernity; instead, the institution
modelled here is able both to keep touch with modernity yet also offer a stable continuity with
its own past.
Continuity—temporal continuity—is thus clearly valuable to the Spectator. ‘We think
they would not feel strangers’: this is posed hopefully. Similarly, the magazine exhibits a clear
45 Wrench, Francis Yeats-Brown, pp. 90-91. This most likely referred to Yeats-Brown’s keen advocacy of Fascist
politics. He published an enthusiastic interview with Mussolini in the Spectator in 1926; see Francis Yeats-Brown,
‘Signor Mussolini: The New Italy Incarnate’, The Spectator, 9 October 1926, pp. 562-63.
46 BL, Add MS 59544, vol. IV f. 84 (Francis Yeats-Brown to Evelyn Wrench, 26 October 1930).
47 C. Townsend, ‘The Story of the “Spectator”’, The Spectator, 3 November 1928, pp. 1-8 (p. 8). It is not clear—
although certainly plausible—if C. Townsend is related to Meredith Townsend (1831-1911), one of the editors
discussed in this article.
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spatial continuity between its political and literary material. While this continuity was not
unique to the Spectator, it was not always present. As seen in the previous chapter, Leonard
Woolf’s literary half of the Nation and Athenaeum was somewhat isolated from the political half,
and clearly a lower priority. The New Statesman also clearly separates the two (see Chapter 5),
and tends to describe the two halves as the ‘front half’ and ‘back half’. For that magazine’s
centenary issue (in 2013) Jonathan Derbyshire wrote about the literary half; he quoted V. S.
Pritchett’s remark that ‘this paper has always been torn in half’.48 In these cases, arguments
concerning the paper’s politics might not necessarily carry any weight with the cultural material.
With the Spectator, the case that they might is far stronger.
One final attempt to characterise this ideology. Introducing Lytton Strachey’s writings
on the Spectator, James Strachey relays an old joke about the Spectator, that it was ‘to be found
[…] on the breakfast table of every vicarage in the country’.49 While Strachey’s joke is in the
realm of affectionate caricature, it does apply a certain set of associations: an intimacy with state
institutions; (again) stability and continuity as vicars provide a large, regular, predictable group
of subscribers; perhaps a reluctance to offend; an emphasis on Christian ethics and traditions. It
is difficult to describe the Spectator’s ideology as anything other than conservative.
*
This is not, of course, a surprise. Conservative is how Leonard Woolf described the
paper; it is the term that springs to mind when Lawrence dismisses the paper as a suitable
location for his opinions, or when it comes down hard against A Survey of Modernist Poetry, or
modernism itself. It is also the political ideology most clearly associated with the periodical as it
has continued to publish weekly issues into the twenty-first century. I have built the case for the
Spectator’s conservatism slowly in order to make an important point for this argument: not
simply that the Spectator’s conservative ideology is the central constitutive element of the
periodical as institution (although it most certainly is) but that this ideology heavily influences
48 Jonathan Derbyshire, ‘The Pantomime Horse’, The New Statesman, 12-25 April 2013, pp. 144-45 (p. 144).
49 Strachey, Spectatorial Essays, p. 7.
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the way the paper behaves, to an extent that is unlike any of the other magazines considered by
this thesis.
Indeed, just as it is not sufficient to take an assertion from the contemporary Spectator
and conclude that the periodical is conservative, the nature of its conservatism—of
conservatism itself—is not simple. Just as there are moments where the paper denies the validity
of modernist art, there are moments such as that in T. E. Lawrence’s letter, where his largely
accurate understanding of the periodical’s ideology fails to predict its reception of his ideas. Or
critical terms such as Williams-Ellis’s ‘mystic realist’ for Woolf, which is perplexing but clearly
does more than just resist classifying her work as experimental. Conservatism is often described
simply as a resistance to change. John Charmley opens his history of the Conservative party
with what purports to be a convincingly tautological definition: ‘The Conservative Party exists
to conserve […] Unfortunately for it and its adherents, all things change.’50 But this will not do,
as both the examples taken from the Spectator and broader discussions of conservatism
demonstrate.
Defining conservative ideology is not easy, and clear statements are few and far between.
Part of the problem, perhaps, lies in the theoretical tendency (outdated yet tenacious) to define
conservatism as anti-ideological in nature. E. H. H. Green describes this idea as ‘puzzlingly
long-lived’, citing a range of thinkers; two examples from the twenties are Walter Elliot’s
description of conservatism as ‘an observation of life and not a priori reasoning’, and John
Buchan’s similar notion of ‘a spirit not an abstract doctrine’.51 As Green illustrates, while it is
demonstrable that conservative thought tends not to make much use of ‘formal statements of
political belief’—certainly less than, say, Marxism, to take only the most obvious example—the
idea that conservatism is genuinely non-ideological in nature is laughable; as Green puts it,
50 John Charmley, A History of Conservative Politics Since 1830, 2nd edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 1.
51 E. H. H. Green, Ideologies of Conservatism: Conservative Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2002), pp. 2-3.
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‘Conservatives do possess, indeed must possess, an ideological map of the world which enables
them to identify objects of approval and disapproval, friend and foe.’52
An influential illustration of just such an ‘ideological map’ was provided by Hugh Cecil’s
1912 discussion of conservative thought.
Progress whether in science or in the arts of government or of social life, requires a certain
readiness to go beyond experience and to try novelties. Yet if that readiness be reckless and
unbridled, disaster is certain. Desire to move forward and try what is new must be harmonized
with distrust of the untried and fear of the dangers that may be lurking in the unknown. Wisdom is
not so anxious for progress as not to be afraid of novelty; not so afraid of novelty as to be contented
without progress. The two sentiments of desire to advance and fear of the dangers of moving,
apparently contradictory, are in fact complementary and mutually necessary. The restraints of
conservatism are the indispensable condition of the security and efficiency of progress in all regions
of human activity from Parliament to a motor-car. In both a brake is necessary to safety. And
restraint is not only essential to hinder what is foolish, but also to guide and control what is wisely
intended and save movement from becoming vague, wild and mischievous. Progress depends on
conservatism to make it intelligent, efficient and appropriate to circumstance.53
Progress can be ‘intelligent, efficient’, but only if conservative principles are properly applied.
Cecil’s motor-car image is powerful and, for 1912, intensely modern. Conservatism, as the
brake, is not trying to make the car go backwards, or even stand still, but is a vital component of
safe onward progress. The political theorist Michael Freeden makes a similar point, arguing
that the key motivation for a conservative ideology is the notion of organically managed change.
Conservatism […] is not an ideology of the status quo. It is not merely an attempt to forestall
change and to arrest the historical process. Rather, it is an ideology predominantly concerned with
the problem of change: not necessarily proposing to eliminate it, but to render it safe. […]
Predominantly, conservatives identify desirable change as growth and hence ‘natural’.54
When modernism comes under discussion, then, a common reaction is to see it as unnatural
growth and hence to reject it: consider, again, the use of scare quotes and of prefixes such as
‘advanced’ that are discussed earlier in this chapter.
But to characterise modernism as inimical to conservatism in all ways and at all times is
too reductive, and in particular ignores the pluralisation of modernism now so important to
modernist studies. The question of modernism and politics itself forms, in Michael Levenson’s
52 Green, Ideologies of Conservatism, p. 3.
53 Hugh Cecil, Conservatism (London: Williams and Norgate, 1912), pp. 13-14.
54 Michael Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 332.
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words, an ‘abiding puzzle’.55 Many different political viewpoints were found in many different
modernisms; additionally, as David Weir points out, the link between progressive art and
progressive politics is unclear. ‘The artist who rebels against aesthetic tradition may nonetheless
be politically conservative. By the same token, the most reactionary political figure may also be
the most receptive to avant-garde art.’56 When it comes to assessing modernist literature, then,
the simplest way in which the Spectator’s ideology can locate organic growth is to pick out those
authors that seem most readily compatible with notions of steady historical change, reverent of
tradition and unwilling to challenge the social order.
T. S. Eliot, of course, stands tall. While Eliot was much mocked in the early years of his
career, and perceived as part of an avant-garde, by the late twenties his own drift towards a
more conservative position was clear, and the Spectator’s reception of T. S. Eliot was very often
deeply appreciative.57 The magazine described Eliot as ‘so considerable a poet’, disliked the
‘frozen timidity’ of his Poems 1909-1925, yet argued that ‘technical and “mere literary” virtues
[…] abound in Mr. Eliot without measure’.58 One might expect a conservative critique of Eliot
to focus on the lack of rhyme, the use of quotation and allusion, or modern subject matter, but
the Spectator is quite happy to accept the ‘technical’ and ‘literary’ virtues of Eliot’s verse. As
might be expected, his critical prose lends itself particularly well to the Spectator’s outlook.
Spectator writers treat Eliot not only as an important writer but as a key critic to mention when
discussing other works: acknowledging, for example, in a review of a new edition of Hazlitt,
Eliot’s dislike of that writer. The Spectator writes that ‘It may be that Hazlitt had the least
interesting mind of all our great English critics, as Mr T. S. Eliot has stated’.59 Notably, this
demonstrates a thorough knowledge of Eliot’s criticism. Hazlitt is criticized only obliquely in
55 Michael H. Levenson, Modernism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), p. 270.
56 David Weir, Anarchy & Culture: the Aesthetic Politics of Modernism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997),
p. 1.
57 For a fuller description of this change, see Chapter 5.
58 ‘This Week’s Books’, The Spectator, 28 November 1925, p. 987.
59 ‘This Week's Books’, The Spectator, 28 March 1925, pp. 503-04.
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The Sacred Wood (1920), Eliot’s most accessible volume of criticism.60 The Spectator’s review offers
an accurate paraphrase of Eliot’s description of Hazlitt as possessing ‘the most uninteresting
mind of all our distinguished critics’, in Homage to John Dryden (1924), a Hogarth Press
publication on a much smaller scale.61 A later review of Eliot himself, published in 1929,
expands on the importance of his criticism:
Austerity of taste and economy of method place Mr. Eliot in the small company of living writers
whose work is a serious contribution to English prose. The short essays are dense with a thought
which is often concerned with the chief mysteries of life; yet this density of thought is not at first
perceived by us, because a deliberate purgation of the mind has given to it clarity and quietness of
expression.62
The review focuses not on Eliot’s modernism, but instead associates his writing with a series of
related attributes: austerity, economy, seriousness, density, purgation, clarity, quietness. A
‘contribution’ has been made to ‘English prose’, but this change is not forced or unnatural but
measured and organic. Eliot offers progress, but progress tempered and controlled by the solid,
serious, thoughtful, restrained nature of his prose. Nowhere can one see Eliot’s more radical
side: this is modernist criticism reimagined as something wholly amenable to conservative
ideology.
But Eliot is an easy target. Only the most restrictive understanding of conservative
thought could be surprised by the appeal of the measured and calm critical prose of this Anglo-
Catholic Anglophile to a magazine like the Spectator. Nevertheless, it is vital to emphasize how
the Spectator praises certain aspects of Eliot’s work over others, crafting an image of this poet that
is compatible with the periodical’s ideology. It must be granted that Eliot’s work might be seen
as amiable to just such a portrayal, but it is a very particular portrayal. One is reminded of
Freeden’s well-chosen words on conservatism, not attempting to deny change but to ‘render it
60 T. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Methuen, 1920), pp. 17, 18.
61 T. S. Eliot, Homage to John Dryden: Three Essays on Poetry of the Seventeenth Century (London: Hogarth Press, 1924), p.
17; ‘This Week's Books’, p. 503.
62 [Evelyn Underhill], ‘Mr Eliot's Essays’, The Spectator, 9 February 1929, pp. 206-09 (p. 206). I assign this review
(signed ‘E. U.’) to Evelyn Underhill (1875-1941). Several other essays in the Spectator under these initials are reviews
of theology, and Underhill’s DNB entry names her as the Spectator’s theological editor (no dates given for this
position).
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safe’. The verb is active, and its use contains hints of both representing and making.63 When the
Spectator’s conservative ideology seeks to understand modernism, to render it safe, it does not
merely pick and choose the elements it judges compatible, but crafts something it can
understand and praise.
Consider a review written by the Irish poet Austin Clarke in 1929, of five new
collections of poetry.64 He begins by considering Ezra Pound’s Selected Poetry, introduced by T. S.
Eliot.65
Reform and change in English poetry have always been effected by constitutional means. But
radical poets, in opposition, play a useful part by disturbing the slumbers of more successful poets
upon the Front Benches; they are necessary to a tradition that has phlegmatic tendencies. The
excesses of the Cockney School quickened the development of Keats; Darley’s fantastic glitter may
have spurred Tennyson to brighter lines. It is too soon to see how the modernist practice of Mr.
Ezra Pound and others will stimulate constitutional poetry, but it is not too soon to realize how
often modernists spoil their own development by remaining in opposition. The great poets have
always compromised themselves: in bringing back simplicity of diction, Wordsworth and Coleridge
fell into a phase of idiocy, but neither settled down to foolishness in order to spite the critics.66
Clarke begins his review by introducing an extended metaphor: the current state of English
poetry as the House of Commons, complete with established poets on the Front Government
Benches, and new voices in opposition. Unlike the anonymous review of Riding and Graves,
Clarke does not fail to find merit in modernism. He both praises Pound’s work and argues that
the introduction of ‘radical’ material is necessary, and has a ‘part to play’. His analysis remains
deeply—even carefully—ambivalent, suggesting that traditional poets are ‘more successful’ but
also ‘phlegmatic’ and in ‘slumbers’; Pound can ‘stimulate’ but might also ‘spoil’ if he remains
too long in opposition. The image is at once entirely appropriate to the Spectator and a complete
mismatch with the terms of modernist poetry as Pound, at least, would have seen them.
Pound’s emerging fascist views notwithstanding, his treatment of poetry and modernism is
63 OED, ‘render, v.’, sense 3.b, 18.a.
64 Austin Clarke (1896-1974) wrote poetry, novels, and verse theatre, alongside reviews and journalism for a range
of periodicals: the Times Literary Supplement, Observer, T. P.’s Weekly, Nation and Athenaeum, London Mercury, as well as the
Spectator. His reviews were described as ‘workmanlike’, although this particular example is fascinating. See DNB.
He wrote forty-three articles for the Spectator, the first twenty-five of which were published under Evelyn Wrench.
65 The other four collections reviewed: Edith Sitwell, Gold Coast Customs and Other Poems; Edgell Rickword, Invocations
to Angels and the Happy New Year; Edward Thompson, The Thracian Stranger and Other Poems; E. R. Dodds, Thirty-Two
Poems.
66 Austin Clarke, ‘Unconstitutional Poetry’, The Spectator, 9 March 1929, Literary Supplement, p. 377 (p. 377).
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closer to revolutionary fervour rather than parliamentary debate: the instruction that poets
should ‘Make It New’ hardly suited to the tone of the Commons, even in opposition.67
The chosen metaphor is thoroughly appropriate to the Spectator. Just as the magazine
itself was compared to the institutions of the British state, it reaches for those institutions in
order to comprehend modern poetry. It is a gesture so apposite to John Strachey’s image of the
Spectator—on the breakfast table of every vicarage—that it almost seems a caricature. More
significantly, however, the use of Parliament denies the modernist poet an attempt at
revolutionary rupture and anticipates the moment when such poets are fully integrated into the
tradition of English poetry. This process is seen as inevitable, part of the regular onward drive
of British culture; the only freedom that Pound and his contemporaries have is to linger in
opposition and ‘spoil’, a concept that, given Pound’s likely distaste for either side of the
metaphor, is no freedom at all.
While this metaphor might be slightly humorous in intent, it can also be taken wholly
seriously as an attempt to fashion English poetry along lines palatable to the Spectator, even if
those lines are not exactly recognizable to modernism itself. The words ‘modernism’ and
‘modernist’ are used here: the first instance, a reference to the ‘modernist practice of Mr Ezra
Pound’ is fairly straightforward, but the second—Edgell Rickword’s tendency to ‘mistake the
first ferment of the imagination, in which useless matter is thrown up by the mind, for
modernism’—is less so.68 What, precisely, is referred to here? Clarke quotes from Rickword’s
poem ‘Earth and Age’ and suggests that he is too focused on ‘incongruities to surprise us’.
‘Modernism’ itself is left usefully undefined, a placeholder term that could simply be replaced
with ‘good modern poetry’. Clarke argues only that two characteristics of Rickword’s poetry—
67 For example, Matthew Feldman’s recent work on Pound’s fascism emphasizes his ‘oft-cited radical
temperament’, even before his open shift to supporting Mussolini, and argues that his drift towards fascist thought
was evident through the twenties, developing into open support for Italy in the thirties. In particular, Feldman cites
the important of Lawrence Rainey’s work on the Malatesta Cantos; Rainey suggests that this poem celebrates
‘heroic individualism’ and implies that ‘Mussolini is a reincarnation of Sigismundo Malatesta’. See Matthew
Feldman, Ezra Pound's Fascist Propaganda, 1935-45 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Pivot, 2013), pp. 10-14; Lawrence S.
Rainey, Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 142-
45.
68 Clarke, ‘Unconstitutional Poetry’, p. 377.
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incongruities, and useless mental matter—are not modernism, and that the latter has been
mistaken for it.
This is a crucial analytic shift: Clarke has set up ‘modernism’ as a term of potential
praise, but has refrained from defining what modernism might look like, retaining the authority
to label a new poem as successfully modernist or not. The implication is not only that the
Spectator’s own evaluative ability is emphasized (certainly over that of, say, Ezra Pound or T. S.
Eliot) but that a space is opened up for the Spectator to construct modernism as something
amenable to its own cultural politics, just as Clarke’s constitutional metaphor attempts at the
start of his review. Rather than simply acknowledging modernism and choosing to turn away,
as with Riding and Graves, here the Spectator attempts to refashion modernism in its own image.
Clarke’s constitutional metaphor thus contains implications that transform modernism
into something with which the Spectator is entirely comfortable. The periodical is evaluative, still,
but this evaluative role can be perceived as active, even energetic. Alison Light, in an influential
discussion of conservative fiction, taps into something very similar. She writes of
a conservative modernity: Janus-faced: it could simultaneously look backwards and forwards; it
could accommodate the past in the new forms of the present; it was a deferral of modernity and yet
it also demanded a different sort of conservatism from that which had gone before.69
There is thus a need to
identify conservatism’s shifting appeals, its imaginative purchase as a fertile source of fantasy,
inspiration and pleasure which, though it has had its discernable constancies, is also continually
finding new sources of expression.70
My interest here is not the novels that Light sees as representative of conservative modernity;
rather, it is in her portrayal of conservatism as neither irrelevant nor important only because it
was influential, but as energetic and exciting. In much the same way, the Spectator interrogated
modernism, sometimes dismissing it, sometimes recrafting and reshaping it to form a
modernism that the Spectator’s conservative ideology could appreciate. In the last section of this
69 Alison Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars (London: Routledge, 1991), p.
10.
70 Light, Forever England, p. 16.
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chapter, I will explore how far such conservative constructions of modernism can be pushed,
and suggest that these energetic rewritings can also distort.
*
The Spectator very often criticizes modernism. When it does praise modernism, it praises
a modernism that is made accessible to conservative ideology. In certain cases, however, the
transformation that is wrought on modernist texts for the Spectator’s purposes is drastic, and
problematic. We are shown not just a conservative version of modernism but the distorted
image of modernist literature that should, I propose, be understood as a misreading. In particular,
I want to discuss two texts by James Joyce, and two by Virginia Woolf. All four reviews are
positive, and all four are problematic.
James Joyce was, in the late 1920s, still a controversial figure to praise. Ulysses was
banned in the UK and would not be available for several years. The Spectator tended to support
the government in its efforts to ban and censor. In 1928, for instance, it came down against
Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness.71 Nevertheless, the Spectator praised Joyce’s work, even his
banned work. In 1930, E. H. Carr, writing a retrospective of the past 25 years of literature titled
‘The Age of Unreason’, discusses the merits of Dostoevsky, Stendhal, Proust, Lawrence, and
Huxley before turning ultimately to Joyce.
It may nevertheless be confidently predicted that, when future generations wish to study this
curious episode in English literature and thought, they will turn not to Chrome Yellow [sic], but to
Ulysses. It is true that the former is eminently readable, and that to digest the latter is a serious
strain even on the most plodding bookworm. But there are, as the schoolboy knows to his cost,
many unreadable classics in English, as in other literatures; and it would be a mistake to imagine
that some of them were ever readable. Into this category of unreadable classics Joyce’s masterpiece
will eventually fall; for it is the one serious, and in its way successful, effort in English to create a
new literary form for the school of unreason. It brilliantly combines the essential elements of the
child’s puzzle, the dyspeptic’s nightmare, and the fever patient’s delirium. It is purely sub-rational;
it is what might, a few years ago, have been called sub-human; but, whatever the epithet, it will
71 An unsigned article notes that the Spectator decided not to publish a review of Hall’s novel as ‘the subject of
sexual perversion is one that is better ignored’. The periodical does note that ‘a strong case can be made for the
writer who desires to portray the life of the day in all its aspects—sordid as well as wholesome’. However, it
concludes that ‘In the interests of the majority it is not desirable that the millions of readers of the popular Press
should be given such mental food. The public is all the better for this censorship. […] We rightly think that the
community must be protected from itself. Right thinking is the prelude to right living. Our minds must have
inhibitions and restraints as much as our bodies. A discussion of sex is not on a par with that of most subjects.’ See
‘The Censorship of the Mind’, The Spectator, 1 September 1928, pp. 258-59 (pp. 258-59).
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remain, for those who come after, the one adequate expression and symbol of our present
discontents.72
Carr’s text manages a largely successful interpretation of Joyce’s modernism via the Spectator’s
conservative ideology. He recognizes a break with Victorian literature, but proposes this break
not as a revolution, but a necessary response to ‘present discontents’. As he sees it, the ‘age of
unreason’ has seen the ‘disintegration of the human personality’. Proust—the ‘complete and
final’ writer on this—‘prove[d] not merely that the human personality was an imperfectly co-
ordinated bundle of sensations, but that even the sensations themselves were but the fantastic
echoes of a half-remembered, half-imagined past’.73 Thus, a conservative magazine can
accommodate a work as challenging as Ulysses by posing its modernist form as simply the
necessary response to a challenging world, something which, as a ‘classic’, all great literature
does.
Note the crucial difference in this analysis to the way in which ‘advanced’ is deployed to
criticize modernism. There, the work/artist is given an independent and controlled agency, and
develops an idea far beyond what is appropriate or natural. One thinks again of Freeden’s
emphasis on organic, natural, controlled change. Here, the Spectator retains critical agency. The
crucial act is not Joyce’s reckless way with language or plot or subject matter, but (in Carr’s
article) the identification of ‘our present discontents’. Ulysses is not advanced—and hence
unnatural or forced—but merely appropriate. In Carr’s words, uniquely ‘adequate’. Not only
does this analysis fit neatly with the Spectator’s conservative ideology, it also reinforces the
periodical’s position as authoritative, evaluative magazine, identifying issues in contemporary
society and interpreting literature on those terms. Such a reading is also, of course, hardly a
controversial one: modernism as a response to modernity. But one notes, also, that in order to
make this argument Carr is forced to discount any possibility of actually reading Ulysses. Joyce’s
combination of ‘puzzle’, ‘nightmare’ and ‘delusion’ may well be appropriate, rather than
advanced, but it is a modernism that is not intended to be read. Carr attempts to pass this off
72 E. H. Carr, ‘The Age of Unreason’, The Spectator, 26 April 1930, p. 698 (p. 698).
73 Carr, ‘The Age of Unreason’, p. 698.
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with a glib comment about schoolboy reading, but theoretically this is a fundamental problem
for his analysis.
An unsigned review of Anna Livia Plurabelle does suggest that modernism can be read, but
presents a curious image of Joyce’s work.
What is important in Joyce is what he has in common with the best writers of all ages, which is,
what are generally called the human qualities. Were it not for the possession of these, and to a
surprising degree, it is unlikely Joyce would be the significant figure he is.74
On Anna Livia Plurabelle in particular:
The author traces the course of the River Liffey from its source to the sea. Much of it is difficult of
apprehension, but for lyricism there can be few passages in literature to compare with parts of it.
No spring ever welled forth so joyously, so evocatively, or pursued its course so profoundly through
the deepest human sentiments. In these passages the author reveals himself as one of the great
landmarks of English prose. It seems unlikely that such sheer craftsmanship will, in this particular
direction, ever go further.75
That use of ‘reveals’ announces Joyce’s proper place in the literary canon. It is almost a fait
accompli: as if the reviewer has turned the page to find one of the ‘great landmarks’. The
question of modernism’s place in the canon is discussed at greater length in Chapter 5, but here,
at least, Joyce’s place in the tradition of English prose is firmly established. In particular, Joyce’s
‘sheer craftsmanship’ is important, and unlikely to be matched. ‘Craftsmanship’ is an unusual
noun to choose. It asks the reader to consider, perhaps, the technical skill involved in crafting
the structure of the novel, in shaping sentences and characters, even in the poetic qualities of
Joyce’s prose. It is also fundamentally human—tactile and organic—as that first reference to
Joyce’s ‘human qualities’ makes clear.
‘Craftsmanship’ and ‘human qualities’ work to place Joyce’s novel in a critical tradition
that is identified ultimately with John Ruskin. In ‘The Two Paths’ (1859), Ruskin argues that
‘All art worthy of the name is the energy—neither of the human body alone, nor of the human
soul alone, but of both united, one guiding the other: good craftsmanship and work of the
74 ‘James Joyce’, The Spectator, 22 November 1930, p. 801. Notably, the Spectator misspells Joyce’s title, naming the
text under review Anna Livia Plurabella.
75 ‘James Joyce’.
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fingers joined with good emotion and work of the heart’.76 Indeed, Ruskin’s famous veneration
of Gothic architecture is rooted in the way in which the variety and imperfection of Gothic
forms preserve the craft of the individual workmen:
Go forth again to gaze upon the old cathedral front, where you have smiled so often at the
fantastic ignorance of the old sculptors: examine once more those ugly goblins, and formless
monsters, and stern statues, anatomiless and rigid; but do not mock at them, for they are signs of
the life and liberty of every workman who struck the stone; a freedom of thought, and rank in scale
of being, such as no laws, no charters, no charities can secure.77
‘Craftsmanship’ thus evokes a tradition for Joyce’s work to be located in. Instead of a radical,
experimental form, Anna Livia Plurabelle is presented as a creative development in an intellectual
tradition, stretching back to the mid-nineteenth century. Ruskin was at this time perhaps one of
the most recognizable figures in the cultural establishment; not for nothing does Leonard Bast,
Forster’s archetypal autodidact, attempt to improve his cultural knowledge by reading The Stones
of Venice.78
In certain ways, the Spectator’s focus on Joyce’s craftsmanship has intriguing
consequences. One might, for instance, connect Ruskin’s idea of craftsmanship preserving
humanity in a built environment to Joyce’s playful evocation of anthropomorphized landscapes
in Anna Livia Plurabelle. On the other hand, though, this description of Joyce places him quite
specifically in an artistic tradition that might be seen as an alternative to modernism, rooted in
mid to late nineteenth century aesthetic theory. The invocation of ‘craftsmanship’ denies almost
all sense of modernist innovation. What is one to do, say, with Joyce’s relationship with
modernity? With his experiments with the mechanistic—say, the use of newspaper headlines in
Ulysses? In Anna Livia Plurabelle, how does craftsmanship—with its associations with an
endeavour taken seriously, resulting in the production of a finely wrought object—
accommodate the text’s profound aurality, or its punning humour?
76 The Works of John Ruskin, ed. by Alexander Wedderburn and E. T. Cook, 39 vols (London: George Allen, 1903-
12), XVI, 385.
77 ‘The Nature of Gothic’, in Works of Ruskin, X, 193-94.
78 E. M. Forster, Howards End (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), pp. 61-62.
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This review suggests that this form can develop ‘no further’: Joyce’s work is not the
mark of something new, a trigger for further innovation, but the culmination—and therefore
death—of something old. In this light, the ‘craftsmanship’ interpretation resembles not so much
an intriguing thought as an argument condemning Joyce’s new experiments as fruitless:
admirable, but not productive of future work. Compare a far more openly negative review of
Joyce’s work.
New possibilities of speech can never be arrived at by running an artifice to death. […] Mr Joyce is
not unlike those Latinists who, in the decadence of the Empire, turned to acrostics and centos.
Weary of the old tradition, they could never free themselves from it; they meddled with it, analysed
it, dispersed it, rearranged it. They strove for originality of style and for uniqueness; but nothing
spoke through them. There was no élan to make them speak; their words, in consequence, were
more dead than the tradition they were trying to escape.79
This reviewer is drawing on a line of argument about the late Roman empire that can be traced
ultimately to Edward Gibbon. As this comparison makes clear, the decadence and sterility of
late Rome were held to be notorious. For the Spectator, this is a classic allusion: moralistic,
conservative, learned but not obscure. My point is that this dismissive analysis shares key
similarities with the far more positive association of Joyce with craftsmanship. In both cases, a
conservative modernism is an impotent, decadent, finished modernism.
One cannot, of course, argue that this unusual review of Anna Livia Plurabelle is entirely
representative of a wholly coherent perspective on modernism. But even if this text is not
typical, it is valuable to acknowledge the significant problems within it. It is both an
idiosyncratic reading of Joyce and a flawed one: this does not mean that this text, or indeed this
periodical, is incorrect about modernism. Rather, it performs a misreading that is itself a
fascinating piece of criticism: of miscriticism, perhaps. Rather than imagining a single, accurate
reading of modernism with which this text fails to align, I suggest that we might see a range of
readings of modernism, and be aware of the flaws in each.
79 ‘Mr James Joyce’, The Spectator, 3 August 1929, pp. 162-63 (p. 163).
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Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz seize on a similar imperative in their 2008
collection of essays, Bad Modernisms. The unusual choice of adjective is important, as the editors
discuss.
The contributions to Bad Modernisms concern moments in which a work or performance has been
misjudged or misunderstood. Purporting to set right prior misprisions is, of course, the very bread
and butter of scholarly production in our time, but a little reflection will reveal that something
more than this routine manoeuvre is at work here. In each of the cases laid out by our contributors,
a failure of apprehension seems fundamental to the very interest of the work; in each, the way in
which the artefact was bad according to somebody (or was good in the wrong way) tells us
something about its possible meaning or value for us.80
While the collection opens by exploring how modernism was originally mad, bad and dangerous
to know in the eyes of the wider public, Mao and Walkowitz push its remit far beyond this. By
implication, misreadings and misunderstandings of modernism might thus be understood as
highly significant. The Spectator suggests, first, that readings of modernism that with hindsight
are ‘bad’—in that modernist literature is dismissed—nevertheless play an important role in
modernism’s emergence into public life. Second, this conservative periodical was able to create
its own modernism, amenable to its ideology, but only to a certain extent. Even at this early
stage in its public history, the concept of modernism was not empty, and could not be made to
signify in any way a critic chose.
Consider, finally, two reviews of Virginia Woolf. The Spectator failed to review Mrs
Dalloway, but heaped praise on her work following this. This is Rachel Annand Taylor
reviewing To The Lighthouse:
Enigmatic, darkly bright, flowing into the secret recesses of the consciousness, floating out its rose-
pale shells, its wavering shapes, its blood-red coral, moulding people that combine a modern irony
with a mystic reverie, the genius of Virginia Woolf is at once more difficult and more original than
that of any other woman novelist today.81
Two years later, an unsigned review of A Room of One’s Own appears:
Future historians will place Mrs Woolf’s little book besides Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Rights of
Women and John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women. It does for the intellectual and spiritual
liberation of women what those works did for their political emancipation. But A Room of One’s Own
outshines them both in genius.82
80 Bad Modernisms, ed. by Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), p. 15.
81 Rachel Annand Taylor, ‘Fiction: Virginia Woolf and Others’, The Spectator, 14 May 1927, p. 871 (p. 871).
82 ‘A Female Shakespeare?’, The Spectator, 28 December 1929, p. 985 (p. 985).
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‘Genius’ is a common touchstone for both reviews, and both draw on the concept of Woolf’s
writing as something different, inspired, as in the OED’s sense of a genius possessing ‘native
intellectual power of an exalted type’, intellectual power that is formed in ‘instinctive perception
and spontaneous activity’, rather than ‘processes which admit of being distinctively analysed’.83
Woolf’s genius is thus powerful but fundamentally inexplicable, and something that
places her apart from other writers, rather than alongside them. Assessing Woolf in this way has
a different effect in each review. Writing on A Room of One’s Own, deploying ‘genius’ and placing
Woolf with Wollstonecraft and Mill removes her writing from current political debate. Instead,
Woolf is drawn into a tradition of great works about women, contributing to the ‘intellectual
and spiritual liberation’ of the sex. Ironically, this removes the immediacy and social relevancy
of the book’s original form, lectures delivered to some of the first female students at Cambridge
University, just months after those students (if any were aged between 21 and 28) were given
the vote for the first time. The review softens the radicalism which, one feels, the Spectator—
which deplored the suffragettes and wrote against female enfranchisement—would never have
approved of.84 The review suggests that Wollstonecraft and Mill wrote for the ‘political
emancipation’ of women, and it is important to remember that the emancipation concerned—
presumably, enfranchisement—was not granted until over a century after Wollstonecraft and
fifty years after Mill. Perhaps we are led to expect the same for Woolf’s ‘intellectual and
spiritual liberation’.
In a similar sense, the ‘genius’ of To The Lighthouse does not seem especially modern. It
has ‘modern irony’, but also the ‘mystic reverie’ that recalls the ‘mystic realist’ label used for
Woolf in the 1925 review discussed above. The exact characteristics of the writing are obscured,
with the writer preferring to emphasize that it is ‘enigmatic’, and calling on a variety of colours
83 OED, ‘genius, n.’, sense 5. This definition is less helpful than it might be as it has not yet been revised for the
third edition of the dictionary. It was published in 1898, predating this review.
84 When the principle of female suffrage was accepted by the Commons in 1917, the Spectator admitted that ‘In the
abstract we have never been favourable to Woman Suffrage’. ‘[In the House of Commons on Tuesday...]’, The
Spectator, 23 June 1917, p. 690 (p. 690).
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(‘rose-pale’, ‘blood-red’), the exact use of which is unclear. The use of ‘mystic’, and the lush
descriptions of intense colours might perhaps be likened to the reviewer’s own poetry.
‘Duchies of dreamland, emerald, rose
Lie at your command?’
Poverty like a princess goes
In my land.
‘Wherefore the mask of silken lace
Tied with a golden band?’
Poverty walks with wanton grace
In my land.
‘The Princess of Scotland’85
Taylor might be understood as reshaping Woolf’s modernism into a form more amenable to
her own aesthetic programme, but this is also, as with Joyce and craftsmanship, a vision of
Woolf that is aligned with the Spectator’s conservative ideology: organic and natural change.
This Woolf is hardly ‘ultra-subjective’, to call back J. B. Priestley’s phrase.
Starkly put, while Taylor’s relationship to the Spectator’s ideology is clear, her reading of
To The Lighthouse is not. This must not be understood as a criticism of the Spectator. It is all too
easy to look back with hindsight and conclude that Taylor got Woolf wrong: that she made no
real mention of the novel’s relationship with art, or modernity. As I have suggested throughout,
the emergence of modernism into public culture was negotiated by the unusual and distinctive
conservative ideology of the Spectator. On the one hand, moments where that conservatism
caused the magazine to turn away do themselves play a key role in the growing
conceptualization of modernist literature. On the other, the various images crafted by the
magazine of modernism do not reflect an ever-changing view of modernism but rather a
modernism that the Spectator can like. Sometimes, this produces intriguing and provocative
visions of modernist literature. But it seems to me equally valuable to explore the ways in which
these readings misconstrue modernist texts.
The strength of the Spectator’s ideology is such that, at times, one expects it to be able to
completely rewrite modernist texts in its image. The reality is more subtle: dominant
85 This poem is reproduced in several anthologies; for example, The Faber Book of Twentieth-Century Scottish Poetry, ed.
by Douglas Dunn (London: Faber and Faber, 1992), p. 12.
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conservative ideology aside, the Spectator weaves around the emergent concept of modernism,
giving shape to it even as it attacks and misconstrues it. It should not be understood as a
modernist magazine, but the role it played in the history of modernism should be recognized.
150
4. THE LISTENER, 1931-33
For the last two-and-a-half years now we have published a new poem each week—occasionally by
some writer with the standing and reputation of Walter de la Mare or Harold Monro, more often
by younger poets almost entirely unknown to the general public.1
Editorial, The Listener, 12 July 1933
This unsigned editorial has been seen before: its reflection on ‘two-and-a-half years’ of
publishing new poetry opens the introduction to this thesis, as the Listener defends its freedom to
publish modernist poetry, and requests that its readers take such poetry seriously. The editorials
were usually written by Richard Lambert, editor from 1929 to 1939.2 However, Lambert never
demonstrated a great liking for modernist poetry, and this editorial not only defends the
legitimacy of modernism, but accompanies a poetry supplement featuring woodcuts by Gwen
Raverat and poems by, among others, W. H. Auden, C. Day Lewis, and Herbert Read. The
Listener’s poetry—including this supplement—was entirely the province of Lambert’s deputy
and de facto literary editor, Janet Adam Smith. For these reasons, I suggest that this unsigned
piece was most likely written by Smith, as her carefully managed—and later controversial—
supplement saw the light of day.
This chapter posits that the supplement was an extraordinary publishing event—both
for the Listener alone, and for weekly reviews in general—and explores Smith’s career at the
magazine over the previous two-and-a-half years as a case of an individual very much in favour
of a particular form of modernist poetry, attempting to promote that poetry by hook or by
crook in the pages of a weekly magazine. I contend that Smith’s achievement as literary editor
was not simply to publish Auden, but to use poetry to rebel against the very idea of the weekly
review. Where a magazine like the Spectator thought carefully about how modernism might be
1 [Janet Adam Smith], ‘“Modernist” Poetry’, The Listener, 12 July 1933, p. 50.
2 Richard Lambert (1894-1981) joined the BBC in 1927 to work on adult education. The original conception of
the Listener included a significant educational role, with the vague idea that groups of worthy listeners would benefit
most from the ability to study talks after the event. Hence, Lambert—Director of Adult Education—was
transferred to run the new paper. Lambert left the BBC in 1939, in circumstances detailed below, and emigrated
to Canada.
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interpreted through its culturally conservative lens, in the Listener poems and reviews of poetry
were small, guarded spaces that argued passionately for modernism.
The Listener was a weekly magazine published by the BBC from 1929 to 1991. It differs
from the other magazines covered by this study in several key respects. Rather than covering
the week’s political news, and publishing political analysis and book reviews, it printed edited
scripts of BBC broadcast talks, alongside a small volume of original material. The publication of
new poetry falls into this latter category. Debra Rae Cohen, one of the very few scholars to
seriously consider this critically neglected magazine, writes on the Listener’s ‘intermediality’, as a
periodical produced by the BBC and thus linked to radio but competing with and selling next
to regular sixpenny weeklies such as the New Statesman and Spectator.3 As Cohen makes clear, it
was always controversial. In 1929, when the magazine was first announced, a group of
periodicals petitioned the government to intervene, arguing that the BBC, supported as it was
by the licence fee, should not compete with the regular (and often financially precarious) weekly
press. John Reith, the BBC’s charismatic, domineering and ebullient director-general, boasted
of his victory in subduing these naysayers, and the journal was allowed to continue based on the
odd compromise figure of featuring no more than 10 per cent of material not directly related to
broadcasting.4
This unusual gesture, as Cohen notes, set up ‘lasting tensions’ between the Listener and
the corporation that spawned it, and played into the Listener’s ‘peculiar intermedial character’,
‘as archive of broadcasting and supplement to it’, and ‘as editorial entity and broadcasting
adjunct’.5 Put another way, the 10% figure made clear the uncertainty that defined the Listener’s
institutional identity, and was a clumsy attempt by the BBC to control and limit the journal’s
independence. This begs the question, exactly what kind of identity did the BBC intend its new
paper to inhabit? It is clear from the previous chapter that the Spectator functioned as a cultural
3 Debra Rae Cohen, ‘Intermediality and the Problem of the Listener’, Modernism/modernity, 19 (2012), 569-92.
4 John Reith, The Reith Diaries, ed. by Charles Stuart (London: Collins, 1975), p. 146; Cohen, ‘Intermediality’, pp.
573-74.
5 Cohen, ‘Intermediality’, p. 574.
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reference point for independence, prestige, and conservatism; as mentioned above, the BBC’s
own documents on the foundation of the Listener continually name the Spectator as the paper to
emulate, emphasising ‘the value of the prestige of a weekly “Spectator” to the BBC’, or the aim
to ‘produce a weekly review of the ordinary type, or in other words, a “BBC Spectator”’.6
Indeed, the journal was named after that magazine, the name chosen because it was
‘reminiscent of “The Spectator”, which I take it is the type of journal it will be.’7 It seems
plausible to argue that the Listener was intended to be a new example of the ‘ordinary type’: well
respected but hardly exciting.
Of course, as a periodical that took the majority of its printed material from radio talks,
the Listener may have become respectable, but it could never have been ordinary. More critical
attention should be paid to the intermedial texts—somewhere between text and speech—that
the Listener published. But as this thesis considers the weekly review, this chapter focuses entirely
on material that was not broadcast, material produced by an editorial team who were
attempting to run a magazine that was more than just a receptacle for radio talks; in Lambert’s
words, ‘a paper to be read for its own sake’.8
A key part of this endeavour was the weekly publication of new poetry. The Listener
began to print poetry in February 1931, when the magazine was just two years old. Typically, it
printed one poem in every weekly issue, more frequently than the majority of its competitors.
As Richard Lambert recalled in his memoir of working at the BBC, publishing poetry was at
first not controversial.
New modern poetry, like a foundling wrapped in a newspaper, was laid on the doorstep of the
Listener. We could do what we liked with this unwanted brat, that made noises not appreciated by
the microphone-controllers.9
6 Caversham, BBC Written Archives Centre (WAC), Publications: The Listener, R43/60/1 (K. Edwin, ‘The
Listener’).
7 WAC, R43/60/1 (Nicolls to Murray, 25 October 1927).
8 Richard S. Lambert, Ariel and All His Quality: an Impression of the BBC from Within (London: Victor Gollancz, 1940),
p. 115.
9 Lambert, Ariel and All His Quality, p. 128.
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But this ‘unwanted brat’ would later prove controversial. On 12 July 1931 (one hundred and
twenty-seven poems after the first poem on 11 February 1931), the magazine published Smith’s
poetry supplement, ‘Nine Poems’.10 The poems were spread out over four pages: the centre two
were occupied by Auden’s ‘The Witnesses’, and elaborate woodcuts by Gwen Raverat. The
first and last pages featured smaller woodcuts, and poems by C. Day Lewis, John Hewitt,
Bernard Spencer, Herbert Read, John Lehmann, T. H. White, Charles Madge, and Arthur
Ball. None of the poems had been previously published, and even if this supplement had passed
without notice, it would have been a significant publication event for these young poets.
But unnoticed it did not go. Smith’s supplement provoked internal criticism from John
Reith, as Smith later recalled.
There had been many complaints from readers about poems published in the Listener; there were
rumblings within the Corporation too, and a few days after the supplement appeared, Jove
thundered. I was summoned to Sir John Reith, the Director-General, and catechized on the poems
we published in general, on this supplement in particular, and especially on ‘The Witnesses’. The
D-G wanted to know why there was so much that seemed odd, uncouth, ‘modernist’, about our
poems.11
According to Smith, Reith wished that the poems in the magazine ‘should be recognized as
having merit by responsible and informed persons beyond the paper’. Smith proposed T. S.
Eliot, and Reith agreed; Smith later suggested that Reith ‘had in mind Mr Eliot the critic, the
director of Fabers’ [sic], indeed, the member of the Athenaeum, rather than the poet of The
Waste Land’.12 Smith got in touch with Eliot through Herbert Read, and sent him a lengthy
letter setting out the controversy and a packet of Listener poems.13 She also wrote, for Reith, a
report on the poets published by the Listener, listing their credentials and quoting extensively
10 ‘Nine Poems [Poetry Supplement]’, The Listener, 12 July 1933, pp. i-iv. Smith was clearly the prime mover in the
process of arranging this supplement, but she later emphasized the crucial support she received from the
Controller of Publications (Lambert’s direct superior), Ben Nicolls. Janet Adam Smith, ‘Auden and the “Listener”’,
The Listener, 18 October 1973, pp. 532-34 (p. 532).
11 Janet Adam Smith, ‘T. S. Eliot and “The Listener”’, The Listener, 21 January 1965, p. 105. Smith later
republished this short essay with minor revisions; see Janet Adam Smith, ‘T. S. Eliot and “The Listener”’, The
Sewanee Review, 74 (1966), 327-30. Further references to Smith’s ‘T. S. Eliot’ essay cite the original Listener version.
12 Smith, ‘T. S. Eliot’.
13 Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland (NLS), Janet Adam Smith Papers, Acc. 12342/123 (Janet Adam Smith
to T. S. Eliot, 11 October 1933). This letter is evidently a key source for Smith’s 1965 essay for the Listener, as she
repeats key phrases (e.g. ‘odd, uncouth, “modernist”’).
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from positive reviews.14 Eliot prepared a six-page report for Reith in late 1933, on the poetry
that had been published by the Listener since 1931. Here, he robustly defended the importance
of publishing new poetry in weekly papers, and argued for the excellence of the Listener’s
suggestions.15
Janet Adam Smith was thus a forthright and crusading literary editor who deserves
greater recognition. She began as secretary to editor Richard Lambert, but ‘had exceptional
attainments and ability, especially in literary matters’, and ‘it was not long before she was
promoted first to be sub-editor, and later to be assistant editor of the paper.’16 A memo she
wrote for her successor, J. R. Ackerley, makes clear the wide range of her responsibilities:
arranging art articles and coverage of new exhibitions; sending out books for review, and
writing to reviewers; editing manuscripts of reviews; making up the review pages; organizing
the quarterly Book Supplements; dealing with printing the scripts of broadcast book talks, and
preventing overlap with original Listener material; choosing short stories, and choosing poems.17
Smith also regularly wrote reviews, usually unsigned, for the collection of short reviews called
‘The Listener’s Book Chronicle’.18 Smith left the BBC in 1935, and married Michael Roberts,
the editor responsible for New Signatures (1932) and New Country (1933), some of the key early
anthologies for Auden and his contemporaries.19 Roberts would become best known for editing
the first Faber Book of Modern Verse (1936); Smith’s long and prolific career included working as
the literary editor of the New Statesman (1952-60), editing the extremely popular Faber Book of
Children’s Verse (1952), and, as a keen mountaineer (often with Michael Roberts) writing a
popular memoir of mountaineering, Mountain Holidays (1946).20
14 NLS, Acc. 12342/123 (Smith to John Reith, Summer 1933).
15 Caversham, BBC Written Archives Centre (WAC), Special Collections: Pearce, S210.
16 Lambert, Ariel and All His Quality, p. 98.
17 NLS, Acc. 12342/122 (Handover notes, 1935). Ackerley was not a direct successor; Smith was Assistant Editor
with a general remit that included cultural matters, whereas Ackerley was specifically hired as Literary Editor.
18 For a bibliography of Smith’s reviews, compiled by Andrew Roberts, see NLS, Acc. 12342/202.
19 New Signatures, Poems by Several Hands, ed. by Michael Roberts (London: Hogarth Press, 1932); New Country; Prose
and Poetry by the Authors of New Signatures, ed. by Michael Roberts (London: Hogarth Press, 1933).
20 See The Faber Book of Modern Verse, ed. by Michael Roberts (London: Faber and Faber, 1936); The Faber Book of
Children's Verse, ed. by Janet Adam Smith (London: Faber and Faber, 1952); Janet Adam Smith, Mountain Holidays
(London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1946). For further details on Janet Adam Smith, see DNB.
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In previous chapters, I have discussed how weekly reviews explored developing concepts
of modernism. In the case of the Listener, I take a slightly different tack. As an editor of the
Listener, Janet Adam Smith did not simply explore modern literature, but promoted and
defended the right to publish modern poetry. Beyond this, I hope to establish that Smith was
particularly interested in a group of largely young, male, left-leaning and Oxford-educated
poets who emerged in the late twenties and early thirties, described by Samuel Hynes as the
‘Auden generation’.21 While such group identities can be problematic, I use Hynes’s term for
two reasons. First, it emphasizes the centrality of Auden to the way that this periodical thought
about new poetry, a centrality made literal when Auden takes pride of place in the centre pages
of the 1933 supplement. Second, the sense of a ‘generation’ has some truth simply in the
Listener’s publishing record. Under Smith’s direction (and, for that matter, under J. R. Ackerley),
the Listener was where a new poem by Auden, or Stephen Spender, or Louis MacNeice, or C.
Day Lewis, among many others, was placed in front of tens of thousands of readers. The
suggestion that the Listener was an important venue for Auden generation poetry is not new:
Auden himself acknowledged this in a late essay, key works on thirties literature by A. T. Tolley
and Valentine Cunningham point to the Listener, and Jane Dowson’s excellent survey and select
bibliography of Listener poetry again emphasizes Auden generation poetry.22 More importantly,
though, I focus on how Smith’s practice as editor contributed towards the sense that new young
poets were, in fact, a generation, and how such actions should be understood in the context of
the Listener as a new, aspiring weekly review.
In this chapter, then, the focus is less on how the magazine as institution encountered
the developing concept of modernism, and more on how an element within that institution—
Smith, the assistant editor—was able to carve out a space for the Auden generation. In its
21 Samuel Hynes, The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the 1930s (London: Bodley Head, 1976).
22 The Complete Works of W. H. Auden, ed. by Edward Mendelson, 6 vols to date (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1993- ), VI, 360-61; A. T. Tolley, The Poetry of the Thirties (London: Gollancz, 1975), p. 120; Valentine
Cunningham, British Writers of the Thirties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 146, 292; Jane Dowson,
‘Poetry and The Listener: The Myth of the “Middlebrow”’, Working Papers on the Web, 6 (2003)
<http://extra.shu.ac.uk/wpw/thirties/thirties%20dowson.html> [accessed 27 July 2015].
THE LISTENER, 1931-33
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publication of radio scripts the Listener did, indeed, wrestle with the emerging concept of
modernism; Harold Nicolson’s twelve-part series on ‘The New Spirit in Literature’ is a
(groundbreaking) case in point.23 But such moments are not the focus here. Poetry in the Listener
represents a key area of tension between conflicting ideologies: the broader drive to create a
respected BBC Spectator and move the Listener away from the controversy that dogged its first
months, and Smith’s drive to publish new, important poetry of a particular hue—come what
may. To return, briefly, to Hacking’s terms, it might thus be proposed that modernism emerges
into public life not only when studied closely by the institution of the weekly review, but when
that institution itself becomes a site of conflict. In these conflicts, the public legitimacy of
modernism is once again questioned, and the concept thus takes public form.
*
Alongside the wider development of work on modernism and radio, critical interest in
the relationship between modernism and the BBC has intensified in recent years.24 Todd
Avery’s 2006 work, Radio Modernism, remains the most relevant to this study.25 Avery places
John Reith at the centre of his study, and proposes Reithianism—Reith’s doctrine of public
service broadcasting—as a quasi-Arnoldian ethical programme with which various modernist
broadcasters were forced to negotiate when they broadcast from the BBC.26 Indeed, reports of
working at the early BBC emphasised the intense enthusiasm for radio as a transformative
technology, and for the public service ideals of Reithian broadcasting. Richard Lambert
23 See Charlie Dawkins, ‘Harold Nicolson, Ulysses, Reithianism: Censorship on BBC Radio, 1931’, The Review of
English Studies (forthcoming).
24 For recent work on modernism and radio, see Broadcasting Modernism, ed. by Debra Rae Cohen, Michael Coyle
and Jane Lewty (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009); Broadcasting in the Modernist Era, ed. by Matthew
Feldman, Erik Tonning and Henry Mead (London: Bloomsbury, 2014).
25 Much critical work on modernism and the BBC has focused on tracing the careers of particular modernists at
the corporation: Michael Coyle on T. S. Eliot, or Peter Fifield on E. M. Forster, following the publication of a
selection of Forster’s radio talks. See Michael Coyle, ‘“This Rather Elusory Broadcast Technique”: T. S. Eliot and
the Genre of the Radio Talk’, ANQ, 11 (1998), 32-42; Michael Coyle, ‘T. S. Eliot on the Air: “Culture” and the
Challenges of Mass Communication’, in T. S. Eliot and Our Turning World, ed. by Jewel Spears Brooker (London:
Macmillan, 2001), pp. 141-54; Peter Fifield, ‘“I Often Wish You Could Answer Me Back: And So Perhaps Do
You!”: E. M. Forster and BBC Radio Broadcasting’, in Broadcasting in the Modernist Era, ed. by Matthew Feldman,
Erik Tonning and Henry Mead (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), pp. 57-77; E. M. Forster, The BBC Talks of E. M.
Forster, 1929-1960: a Selected Edition, ed. by Mary Lago, Linda K. Hughes and Elizabeth MacLeod Walls
(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008).
26 Todd Avery, Radio Modernism: Literature, Ethics, and the BBC, 1922-1938 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006).
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recalled a remark made to him by Reith, ‘to the effect that there was no public service that the
BBC would not undertake to perform, if called upon by the State to do so—not even the supply
of milk to the population of London!’27 Lionel Fielden, an early programme producer, similarly
wrote that ‘God save us, we really believed that broadcasting could revolutionise human
opinion’.28 However, Avery rightly emphasizes that this shared enthusiasm and Reith’s
‘generous and benign’ intentions should be understood alongside Reith’s ‘sympathy’ for a
‘totalitarian usage of radio’, and, in a broader sense, a ‘desire for social unification’.29
Reithianism was also always autocratic and didactic, seeking to control exactly how
broadcasting might perform a public service, and how listeners should respond correctly to the
material sent to them over the air.
This combination of earnest belief in the BBC’s mission and the desire for control often
resulted in a bureaucracy that interfered with its own creative output regularly and went in fear
of controversy. Lambert argues that conservatism at the BBC rarely took the form of outright
censorship, but was more often a softly-spoken, insidious campaign against anything which
threatened to rock the boat:
There is a kind of negative ‘impartiality’—much affected by official bodies and by those with an
official training—which squeezes out of existence, by neglect, all extremes of thought, and per contra
favours and makes play with mediocrity. There is here no censorship, only a gentle insistence upon
‘good taste’, a gentle repulsion of anything which may ‘offend’. As new ideas are often daring and
unconventional, they can usually be convicted, by those who wish to, of ‘bad taste’.30
This ‘gentle repulsion’ crept into the institutional atmosphere: Janet Adam Smith was once
accused by memo of hanging a bathing suit out a window to dry, a most improper act.31 But in
terms of output, Lambert noted that artistic material, in particular, was targeted by this kind of
censorship.32 Focusing on the Listener, in 1936 Reith wrote to Stephen Tallents (one of
27 Lambert, Ariel and All His Quality, p. 44.
28 Lionel Fielden, The Natural Bent (London: A. Deutsch, 1960), p. 100.
29 Avery, Radio Modernism, pp. 17-19.
30 Lambert, Ariel and All His Quality, p. 144.
31 The complaint against Smith came after the Evening News printed a picture of the aforementioned bathing suit. It
was apparently a case of mistaken identity: Smith did dry a suit ‘after a refreshing swim in the lunch-hour’, but not
the ‘scanty’ one pictured in the press. Smith’s had ‘a decent and respectable skirt’. NLS, Acc. 12342/122 (20 July,
25 July 1934).
32 Lambert, Ariel and All His Quality, p. 145.
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Lambert’s superiors), questioning the Listener’s publications on Picasso, for ‘I think his style is
quite dreadful’, and hinting darkly of those who have ‘strong views’ on the Listener’s art policy.33
Reith wrote a similar memo a few months later, expressing his concerns about reviews of ‘books
of all kinds’ in the Listener. He suggests that ‘The Listener standard, for all kinds of books, was to
be high’, and the true meaning of this only comes out in the last paragraph of the memo, where
it emerges that his problem is with the ‘laudation’ of Aldous Huxley’s Eyeless in Gaza:
[H. A. L. Fisher] thought it the most disgusting book he had read (and having struggled through it
myself I more or less agree with him). At least, he says, if we review, still more recommend such a
book, the reviewer should make it clear that the book is in parts quite disgusting.34
The following year, Tallents wrote to Lambert directly about poetry, suggesting that instead of
publishing a poem a week, they should perhaps only print a poem ‘that has some outstanding
merit in it’. This was, he concluded sorrowfully, ‘a bad time for poetic production’.35
While these individual examples constitute only a patchy record of debate within the
BBC, one is left with the impression of an atmosphere that feared controversy and attempted to
cultivate an artistic conservatism that recognised Huxley as ‘disgusting’, Picasso as ‘dreadful’,
and modern poetry as weak and inconsistent. It is against this background that Smith’s
achievement in publishing a poem a week, placing anonymous book reviews and finally
publishing the ‘Nine Poems’ supplement in July 1933 must be placed: these acts constituted a
meaningful and calculated rebellion against the cultural conservatism of the Reithian BBC,
within the structures of its weekly review. And yet this rebellion began in a characteristically (for
the BBC) low-key fashion, with the publication of Richard Church’s ‘The Anchorite’s Lament’
on 11 February 1931 and the announcement that it was ‘the first in a series of poems by
contemporary writers, which will appear weekly’.36 Over the next two-and-a-half years, Smith
would publish 127 different poems in 125 issues, from 73 different poets. One poet had six
poems (Richard Goodman), two had five (Richard Church and L. A. G. Strong), and two four
33 WAC, R43/60/4 (Reith to Tallents, 2 June 1936).
34 WAC, R43/60/4 (Reith to Alan Dawnay, ‘Book Reviews’, 10 September 1936). Fisher was a historian and
politician, and one of the governors of the BBC.
35 WAC, R43/60/4 (Tallents to Lambert, ‘Poetry in “The Listener”’, 15 December 1937).
36 ‘[Editorial Note]’, The Listener, 11 February 1931, p. 244.
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(Stephen Spender and Ll. Wyn Griffith). 23 poets had either two or three poems, and 47 just
one poem.
Many of these poets were, of course, quickly forgotten. If one considers the first twenty
names, taken alphabetically, from the list of poets who published only once in this period, few
are familiar.37 Nor did many of these poets have a great impact in their own time: of three
contemporary anthologies, two include none of these names, and one includes just three.38
Such a spread merely reflects the reality of publishing new poetry on a weekly basis; as Eliot
would write in his report for Reith, on reviewing the Listener poetry, ‘as one must expect of any
time, the great majority is mediocre and conventional’.39 Indeed, against such a background
Smith’s ability to publish Spender and Richard Goodman multiple times, and her strong focus
on Auden’s ‘The Witnesses’ in the ‘Nine Poems’ supplement, is all the more remarkable.40
T. S. Eliot’s intervention in the Listener poetry controversy in 1933 thus represents a
chance to assess Smith’s work in publishing poetry over the previous two-and-a-half years.
Smith would later write that, wishing to ‘rout the Philistines’, she had hoped for a ‘glowing
testimonial’ from an ‘ally’. Instead, the report was ‘much more valuable, both in its immediate
effect on Sir John Reith’, and as a stimulus for Smith to ‘think more rigorously’ about choosing
poems. It is of course difficult to trace any tangible difference in Smith’s decisions about poetry,
but one effect is clear: ‘Mr Eliot had convinced him [Reith]’, and the Listener was permitted to
continue publishing poetry.41 The fact that Reith, notoriously insistent on the value of his own
37 The names: Marion Angus, Martin Armstrong, John Beevers, Julian Bell, Maurice Bowra, R. J. Cowlin, Walter
D'Arcy Cresswell, W. H. Davies, Charles Davy, Joan Adeney Easdale, Colin D. B. Ellis, Gavin Ewart, Franklin
Folsom, Edgar Foxall, Wilfrid Gibson, Robert Gittings, Brenda Green, Lesley Grey, John Hewitt, and William
Hodgkins.
38 The Progress of Poetry: An Anthology of Verse from Hardy to the Present Day, ed. by Ian M. Parsons (London: Chatto &
Windus, 1936); The Faber Book of Modern Verse, ed. by Roberts; The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892-1935, ed. by W.
B. Yeats (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936). Yeats printed one poem by Julian Bell, seven by W. H. Davies, and four
by Wilfrid Gibson.
39 WAC, S210 (‘Report by Mr T. S. Eliot on The Listener Poems’). Further references to this report are given after
quotations in the text.
40 Richard Goodman, while little known now, was with Auden and his contemporaries at Oxford, and was one of
the editors of the 1932 Oxford Poetry, dedicated to Auden, Day Lewis, and Spender. See Tolley, Poetry of the Thirties,
pp. 39, 57.
41 Smith, ‘T. S. Eliot’.
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opinions, was convinced by Eliot’s report is fascinating, and Eliot’s methods for arguing in
favour of Listener poetry are worth considering closely.
In the report, Eliot is methodical and cautious, making a case for publishing young
modernist poets as an entirely reasonable course of action for a BBC publication. He makes his
points in turn, first arguing that a weekly must publish the young.
the one strong motive [for publication] is advertisement. It is only the younger poets to whom a
weekly can appeal on this ground; when the best older poets give you contributions, you may
regard it as an act of charity on their part. For the first ten years of his working life a poet has
something to gain by having his verse seen occasionally in weeklies; later he has nothing to gain
and indeed something to lose. (p. 1)
Eliot’s report appeals to Reith’s morals and, for want of a better phrase, business sense. Support
young poets: it is a good thing to do and, as they have something to gain, they will work hard
for you. Give readers a good reading experience of poetry: do not make the paper appear non-
serious about poetry. He goes on to praise the Listener for printing the poems in such a way that
emphasizes their value to the paper, as an ‘intelligent weekly’ (p. 2).
The format adopted by The Listener, of having the poem inset in a surround on the same page of
every number, seems to be excellent. The readers know where to look for the Regular Feature and
the form discountenances the suspicion, aroused by most weeklies, that the verse is there only to fill
a vacant space at the foot of a column. (p. 2)
This comment is all the more interesting because it is stretching the truth: poems were inset,
although the degree of this decreases across the period in question, but the poems do tend to
jump around the paper slightly and in certain cases do look to fill up the space at the bottom of
a column. Tempting as it is to suggest that Eliot and Smith were fudging the facts to form a
more coherent case for the Listener’s poetry, this is unlikely. It is far more plausible that Eliot
asked about the publication details of the poems and was told something that was frequently
and (perhaps more importantly) aspirationally true.
Eliot does not use the word ‘modernist’—in a 1926 letter, he described it as ‘pestilential’,
a word ‘for which I can see no excuse’—but even without this word it is difficult not to read his
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text as anything other than an emphatic argument on the importance of publishing modernist
poetry.42
From the point of view of a service to the reading public, as well as that to the young writers, it
seems to me that—I judge from the character of the other contents—a consistent policy of this
kind should appeal to readers of The Listener. This weekly seems to aim at a public which is curious
and avid of information about the latest facts, ideas and discoveries in contemporary art and
thought; its readers, so far as they are interested in poetry, must want to know what sorts of verse
are being written. From this point of view, whether the verse is of the highest quality does not
matter much: what you want to be able to say confidently to your readers is that this is
representative of the best that is being written by men and women of a certain generation. At least
it will serve as a document upon the time, and if the time should not produce any poetry worth
preserving, that would be an interesting fact in itself. By publishing verse in this way, you should
have every hope also of publishing something by the one or two poets who will be recognised ten
or twenty years hence, and thus building up a future reputation for the paper. (pp. 3-4)
This paragraph elegantly restates the aims of a quite provocative artistic policy in terms that
might be more likely to appeal to a reader of Reith’s conservative bent. Eliot argues, essentially,
that it is an unambiguously good thing to trace the ‘latest facts, ideas and discoveries’. His
justification for this position, however, is unusual: Eliot suggests that the magazine should
attempt to position itself as a ‘document upon the time’. Following this logic, publishing a
‘certain generation’, even if that poetry is not immediately accepted, will be more valuable in
the long term. By stretching temporally forward so that the Listener can look back, he places the
magazine not in the avant-garde but in a respected, established, even conservative position of
looking back on now-established poetic masters. To achieve this status of respected literary
magazine, Eliot argues (important to a periodical just four years old, and desperately trying to
leave a mark), one has to embrace the new now in order to look back on it later. Implicitly,
modernist poetry is placed into a position of inevitable authority; the question is not whether
poets like Auden or Spender or Kathleen Raine will become accepted, but when. Eliot offers
the Listener the chance to take part in a movement whose ascendancy is presented as merely a
matter of time.
Eliot’s report does not suggest that all the poets published by the Listener are excellent, as
quoted above; a selection of good and bad is an inevitable consequence of the weekly
42 Eliot went on to comment: ‘What on earth is “modernist verse”? The word is almost as hopeless as “Futurist”.’
The Letters of T. S. Eliot, ed. by Valerie Eliot, Hugh Haughton and John Haffenden, 5 vols to date (London: Faber
and Faber, 1988- ), III, 344 (Eliot to A. L. Hutchinson, 15 December 1926).
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162
publishing model. While this allows the publication of some poor poems (useful if the magazine
runs into criticism on these grounds) it runs the risk of presenting the Listener as a fundamentally
passive record of new poetry; if it attempts merely to find what is new, and currently being
written by a certain generation, then any retrospective authority it might seem to hold would be
almost accidental. Eliot’s report gestures, although only quite faintly, towards a more specific
sense of what exactly this new poetry is beginning to look like. He defines the poetry against
well-known figures of conservatism in poetics: ‘I do not say that the poetry is positively better
than the kind that Sir John Squire would select; but there is this great difference: that Squire’s
kind of poetry is now completely out of date, and this is not’ (p. 5). He goes on to mention
Auden and Spender by name as poets that interest him and have been ‘published on my
recommendation by Faber & Faber’ (p. 6). Finally, Eliot provides a small hint of the types of
qualities he is looking for in new poetry, by offering some brief remarks on Auden. ‘Of all the
younger poets, Auden is the one who has interested me the most deeply, though I feel that it is
impossible to predict whether he will manifest the austerity and concentration necessary for
poetry of the first rank, or whether he will dissipate his talents in wit and verbal brilliance’ (p. 6).
What is important here is not simply that Eliot successfully defended Smith’s editorial
practice, and that the Listener was permitted to go on publishing poetry, although this was no
small achievement. The manner and tone of Eliot’s report is crucial. One might argue that
Eliot was never the most aggressive of prose stylists, but compared to his most famous, early
pieces of criticism—‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ or ‘The Metaphysical Poets’, for
example—this report is cautious, restrained, and always orientated towards the sceptical reader.
In fact, it reads much like many of the careful explorations of modernism found in weekly
reviews that have been discussed by this thesis. Eliot’s defence of Smith, in other words,
constructs her editorial practice as precisely that of a responsible employee, attempting to
establish a ‘BBC Spectator’ that will be able to look back on its achievements with pride. Such
an angle of argument was, of course, precisely aligned to John Reith’s own perspective, and it is
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difficult to imagine that he would have accepted a report that had simply argued for the
aesthetic supremacy of modernist poetry, and the flaws in all other poetry.
This of course begs the question of whether the report was specifically targeted to
appease John Reith, rather than to merely assess the Listener’s record as poetry journal. Eliot, as
sometimes BBC broadcaster and public intellectual, must have been aware of Reith’s
perspective on culture, but I hesitate to suggest that the report was specifically concocted so that
Smith could get away with it, as it were: there is simply no evidence for this. A more productive
question asks whether this report, as a cautious defence of Smith in the manner of a weekly
review, was an accurate representation of her work. Was Smith’s editorial practice as balanced
and careful and uncontroversial as Eliot suggests? This conclusion is difficult to support:
irrespective of the fact that Eliot convinced Reith, Smith’s work at the Listener was in many ways
genuinely radical.
*
By this, I mean that Smith does seem to have used the tools available to her as an editor
to promote Auden generation poets. Rather than simply publishing poetry so that the Listener
might be understood as a journal of historical record, Smith knew precisely what sort of poetry
she liked, and sought to provide a prominent platform for that poetry. There is nothing wrong
with this: many famous editors had very strong opinions, and made no bones about them. But
they were very rarely in charge of weekly reviews, and Smith’s clear angle on modern poetry, in
the context of the sixpenny weekly review, might thus be understood as radical.
This being said, Smith was an intelligent and canny operator who well understood the
benefits that Eliot’s presentation of her editorial practice as serious and even-handed brought
her. As quoted above, she had hoped that Eliot’s report would ‘rout the Philistines’, but it was
actually ‘something much more valuable’.43 While Smith writes of the ‘rigour’ that Eliot’s
report lent to her poetry choices, the report’s influence on Smith is clearest in her publication,
43 Smith, ‘T. S. Eliot’.
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in 1935, of an anthology of Listener poetry, Poems of To-morrow. Merely the title itself signifies
along Eliot’s lines of argument: Smith is offering up Listener poems as a kind of window into
future literary history. Her selections are presented to the reader as a selection of the definitive
tradition, the true and largely modernist future canon.
Indeed, the move to anthologise poetry published in a weekly magazine is unusual,
implying a degree of significance to the magazine’s selections that one might not expect. Smith
presents the anthology in modest terms, suggesting that ‘readers may like to have their poems in
more handy form than the back numbers of the Listener’.44 Despite this, merely by presenting
itself as a handy guide to new poetry, the anthology places the Listener in a position of authority.
Smith writes that Poems of To-morrow
does not aim at presenting the work of every writer of importance of our time, but at offering a
cross-section which may give the reader something of the feel and texture of contemporary
poetry.45
She goes on to make a series of typical justifications of modernist poetry, similar to those found
in her 1933 editorial: poetry must change to reflect the modern world, poetry does not need to
rhyme, modern poetry is not incomprehensible. Smith concludes by arguing that modern
poetry requires a
certain amount of effort and patience, qualities seldom encouraged by anthologies. The pieces in
the standard anthologies are usually worn round and smooth by use, presenting no obvious
difficulties; but a collection of modern verse requires this effort.46
The unargued presumption operating behind this introduction is that the Listener has a position
of authority in contemporary verse. A Listener anthology is not only presented as a legitimate
publishing act, but as something set apart from the ‘standard anthologies’. Smith’s tone (à la
Eliot) is largely careful and restrained, arguing for the magazine as a neutral record-keeper,
offering the reader ‘something of the feel and texture of contemporary poetry’. But there are
also shades of a more forceful argument for modernism, as she requests ‘effort’ from her readers
44 Poems of Tomorrow: an Anthology of Contemporary Verse, ed. by Janet Adam Smith (London: Chatto & Windus, 1935).
No page numbers are given for Smith’s introduction.
45 Poems of Tomorrow, ed. by Smith.
46 Poems of Tomorrow, ed. by Smith.
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and even, to a certain extent, presuming an interest in and favour for modernism among them.
This tendency is hardly in tune with the conservatism and quiet respectability the BBC
envisaged for its magazine.
Furthermore, Poems of To-morrow serves as a clear record of Smith’s attempt to shape the
Listener not just as a location for modern poetry but specifically as a magazine for the Auden
group. The anthology does not reproduce the full corpus of Listener poetry: it is a selection.
Comparing the contents page of Poems of To-morrow against a fuller, unedited list of poets
published in the magazine reveals that Smith pruned non-modernist poets; these may have
been tried out in the Listener, but were excised from the anthology. Richard Church, perhaps
most notably, appears not once in Poems of Tomorrow, even though he has five poems in the
1931-33 period alone. Stephen Spender, by contrast, is reproduced in full. Ll. Wyn Griffiths, a
Welsh poet with few modernist sympathies, has only two of four poems reproduced.47
Otherwise, the table of contents reads like a roll-call of New Signatures, the anthology edited by
Michael Roberts that explicitly offered itself as a record of the Auden group: Auden himself,
Day Lewis, Gascoyne, Lehmann, MacNeice, Madge, Raine, Read, Roberts, Spender, and
Tessimond.
This distorted image of Listener poetry anticipates the majority of the small amount of
scholarly work done on the Listener, which stresses its value as venue for the Auden generation.
A. T. Tolley’s classic The Poetry of the Thirties (1975) summarizes Smith’s clashes with Reith and
Eliot’s intervention with a report, based on Smith’s 1966 article, but goes on to argue that
The mere listing retrospectively of the poets published is no measure of what she had done. One
has to remember that she had published all these poets by the middle of 1933, when very few of
them had books out. In 1931 The Listener included poems by Julian Bell, Richard Goodman and
Stephen Spender; in 1932, it included poems by Goodman, Spender, Tessimond, Day Lewis, and
John Lehmann. All this was before these poets had had much publicity, and before New Verse had
appeared. What was most important was that it brought them before the main body of the
intelligent reading public, which the little magazines, with their circulation in the hundreds, did not
reach. This must have been especially important in the earlier years.48
47 These are ‘The Colours’ and ‘New Years Eve’.
48 Tolley, Poetry of the Thirties, p. 120.
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Tolley thus locates Smith’s work on the Listener as not just in favour of modernism but at the
forefront of the Auden group, as close to the avant-garde as a wide-circulating weekly magazine
can be. Valentine Cunningham echoes the sentiment in British Writers of the Thirties (1988),
quoting Auden describing the Listener as ‘one of our main outlets’, and mentioning a
‘connection’ between the magazine and the Auden group ‘that began when Janet Adam Smith,
wife of the Old Boys’ very own anthologist Michael Roberts, was in the literary editor’s chair’.49
This isn’t quite accurate—Auden is not writing about Smith, but her successor as literary editor,
J. R. Ackerley, and Smith wouldn’t meet Michael Roberts until 1932, when she had already
published Spender, Julian Bell, and Richard Goodman (they were married in 1935, when
Smith left the BBC).50 Cunningham goes on to describe the Listener as ‘almost the house organ
of the Auden group’.51 It should be noted that Smith thought Cunningham connected the
paper and the poets far too closely and clubbishly; this being said, Smith’s work as editor
remains in crucial ways oriented towards promoting Auden generation poets.52
Whether or not the Listener actually was a ‘house organ’ for the Auden generation is, at
this moment, almost besides the point. The key issue is that Smith sought, on the one hand, to
play down her preferences to those above her, so that her power as editor might not be
interfered with and, on the other, attempted to craft the Listener as a venue for the Auden
generation. Her anthology pruned non-modernist poets while featuring Auden generation poets
prominently; her retrospectives on her time at the Listener demonstrate, similarly, a desire to
portray the magazine as wholly devoted to the Auden group’s poetry. Her 1965 essay describes
the process whereby she asked Eliot to be involved in the report defending the Listener’s poetry:
I did not then know Mr Eliot, so asked Herbert Read if he would find out, on Mr Eliot’s return
from America that summer, whether he would be willing to give an opinion on our poems. Mr
49 Cunningham, British Writers of the Thirties, p. 146.
50 See Complete Works of Auden, VI, 360-61.
51 Cunningham, British Writers of the Thirties, p. 292..
52 Writing to Cunningham, Smith acknowledged that the Listener was an important outlet for the Auden generation,
but emphasized ‘it was an outlet too for many other voices’. In the same letter, however, she notes the importance
of her own preferences; once she has the permission to publish new poetry, ‘I then set about finding poems: by
writing to poets whose work I’d read and liked, by asking round among friends in teaching, publishing etc for other
names, whom I would invite to submit their work’. NLS, Acc. 12342/38 (Smith to Valentine Cunningham, 18
January 1998).
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Eliot was willing, so I sent him the supplement, and cuttings of all the poems published in the last
two years. This collection included poems by Conrad Aiken, George Barker, Julian Bell, J. N.
Cameron, Gavin Ewart, David Gascoyne, Louis MacNeice, Edwin Muir, William Plomer,
Kathleen Raine, Michael Roberts, Stephen Spender, A. S. J. Tessimond, and R. E. Warner.53
While this list gives a fair approximation of important poets that the Listener published in the
thirties, it slightly misconstrues the nature of the collection of poetry that Smith would have sent
to Eliot. Of these poets, only Julian Bell, Gavin Ewart, Michael Roberts, Stephen Spender, and
A. S. J. Tessimond had been published in the Listener by July 1933, when the supplement
appeared. None of these poets appeared in the supplement itself. That is only five poets out of
fourteen on Smith’s list; moreover, Bell, Ewart and Roberts had only published one poem
apiece. The other poets on the list do appear later in the thirties, and it is implausible and
unfair to suggest that Smith, writing thirty years after the event, was attempting to deliberately
mislead. It is important to recognize, however, that in an attempt to give the public in 1965 a
flavour of the poems she published in the Listener, Smith reaches not for the names she
published but for a selection of poets strongly associated with the Auden group. In retrospect,
Smith imagines the Listener as a place that argued for the Auden generation.
Publishing a new poet is, in contemporary terms, the purest way of arguing for the
importance of that poet’s work. Looking back on years of poetry publishing and emphasizing
certain names is a clearer act of aligning an institution with a particular group of poets. But the
Listener’s ability to review new poetry—a role more familiar to the other magazines covered by
this thesis—also plays a potentially crucial role in the emergence of new ideas about poetry.
Eliot’s report is notably reluctant to play the critic, offering a few remarks on ‘austerity and
concentration’ that, even in 1933, would have been recognised as common tropes of his literary
criticism. Once again, this plays into the ways in which this report seeks to align the Listener and
new poetry with conservative and establishment values. Eliot prefers to maintain the idea of
poetry that is somehow ineffably good, rather than to closely explore exactly how such poetry
might differ from other, more established models.
53 Smith, ‘T. S. Eliot’.
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But the Listener was not so restrained, offering a series of reviews of new poetry
throughout the two-and-a-half year period under question here. As well as printing edited texts
of talks on poetry by a range of writers, The Listener regularly published reviews of poetry in its
‘Book Chronicle’, a series of unsigned short reviews of new books that appeared every week.
This section of the periodical represents an important part of the magazine’s original material,
and its continued existence was a point of friction with the wider BBC. Debra Rae Cohen notes
that the Book Chronicle pages were ‘Lambert’s most significant gesture towards the status of
“literary weekly”’.54 These short notes were unsigned, which was standard practice for a literary
weekly but unusual for the BBC, as they offered the possibility of reviewers appearing to have
the full weight of the corporation behind their statements. Cohen quotes Val Goldsmith, the
Assistant Controller for Administration, worrying about the appearance of ‘ex cathedra
statements on the merits of a book’.55 Indeed, it was exactly such a statement (albeit reviewing a
radio talk, not a book, in a short-lived radio critic section of the Listener) that led to Raymond
Postgate being ousted from the Listener and the BBC. Postgate criticized the economic policy of
Sir Josiah Stamp, who complained to Reith that such criticisms appeared to be coming from
the corporation itself.56
Lambert notes that the BBC viewed the reviewing of new books almost as a moral
endeavour, so controversial that it was halted altogether for a time:
Reith held strong views as to the responsibilities of reviewers. He held that it was their duty to
encourage ‘wholesome’ fiction, and discourage the ‘unwholesome’. But as much of the best fiction
of the day fell within the latter definition, according to the Puritans, the reviewer with a literary
conscience found it hard to please his BBC employer. The service was for several years
suspended—at the microphone; but as a sop to intellectuals, the Listener was permitted, nay
encouraged, to run a fiction-reviewing feature of its own. We took the opportunity eagerly.57
Later in the thirties, Lambert’s relationship with the BBC soured, and his memoir is
correspondingly eager to place himself at odds with reactionary elements within the
54 Cohen, ‘Intermediality’, p. 585.
55 Cohen, ‘Intermediality’, p. 585.
56 Cohen, ‘Intermediality’, p. 585.
57 Lambert, Ariel and All His Quality, p. 126.
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corporation.58 Nevertheless, the BBC was often unsure if it should be reviewing new fiction on
the air, a worry that did not trouble the Listener. As the example of Aldous Huxley’s Eyeless in
Gaza showed, Reith could and did interfere. At the very least, it must be concluded that book
reviews were perceived as an important and controversial way for the corporation to intervene
in and comment on cultural matters. Furthermore, one might suggest that Smith’s continual
promotion of modernism through the poetry reviews amounts to a substantive defiance of
Reith’s clear view on ‘unwholesome’ literature.
Smith promoted the Auden generation through reviews in two ways: by giving generous
coverage to Auden generation poets, and by giving reviews to critics who were likely to receive
the poets kindly. While the ‘Listener’s Book Chronicle’ reviews were anonymous, some can be
traced. As mentioned above, Smith met her future husband Michael Roberts through her work
as literary editor. While Roberts was working on anthologies of Auden generation poetry, he
also reviewed Spender’s Poems for the Listener in February 1933.59 The second of Roberts’s
anthologies—New Country—was reviewed in April 1933 by F. R. Leavis, who had previously
reviewed Auden’s The Orators in June 1932.60 To be clear, Smith should not be accused of
consciously trying to generate positive reviews for Auden generation poets. It is more likely by
far that Smith sent new books she liked to critics she respected, and that she respected critics
who broadly shared her preference for modernist poetry.
It is, however, significant that when volumes of poetry by Auden, Spender and Roberts
came to the Listener they were reviewed by Leavis and Roberts; not simply because such critics
would write positive reviews, but because they write those reviews from a perspective that is
58 Lambert drew the corporation’s ire over a somewhat farcical case of slander known as ‘The Case of the Talking
Mongoose’. He wrote a light-hearted book with his friend Harry Price, The Haunting of Cashen’s Gap (1936), about
the supposed phenomenon of Gef the talking mongoose, witnessed on a farm on the Isle of Man. This book was
used by Sir Cecil Levita to cast aspersions on Lambert’s suitability to serve on the board of the British Film
Institute; on discovering this, Lambert sued for libel. The BBC was heavily embarrassed in the case once it
emerged that it had put pressure on Lambert to abandon the case, and implied that his job was at risk. While
Lambert returned to work at The Listener in 1937, having received £7600 in damages (a huge sum), he would leave
two years later in 1939, and emigrated to Canada. See Lambert, Ariel and All His Quality, pp. 216-318.
59 Attributed to Roberts by R. Hamilton; see A Portrait of Michael Roberts, ed. by T. W. Eason and R. Hamilton
(Chelsea: College of S. Mark and S. John, 1949), p. 67.
60 Attributed to Leavis by Smith; see Smith, ‘Auden and the “Listener”’, p. 532.
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deeply familiar with the poets and poetry under consideration. For example, Leavis’s review of
Auden’s The Orators has many reservations about the volume: ‘Too often, instead of complexity
and subtlety, he [Auden] gives us a blur’; he also notes ‘satisfaction in undergraduate
cleverness’.61 But these criticisms also come with significant praise, which seem to overrule
them: ‘a certain strength that makes Mr Auden’s work remarkable’. More importantly, Leavis
clearly has an easy familiarity with Auden’s work and his place in literary culture; he writes of
the ‘first book of poems [that] has already won him a reputation’, and sees Auden’s modernism
as nothing surprising.
We expect some measure of difficulty in modern verse; indeed we are suspicious when we find
none. But now that fashion has come to favour modernity there is a danger that difficulty may be
too easily accepted.62
Crucially, Leavis’s problems with The Orators do not come from a worry that this form of poetry
is inherently problematic—compare the review of A Survey of Modernist Poetry in the Spectator—but
from the more specific concern that this excellent poet might be resting on his laurels; ‘modern
poetry has vindicated the right to demand hard work from the reader. But we demand of the
poet that he should have done his share, and in Mr Auden’s case we are not convinced.’63 For
Leavis and the Listener, the poetry that Auden is writing is, in an unproblematic way, precisely
the type of poetry that young poets should be crafting, even if individual instances of that poetry
do not match up to expectations. Modernist poetry is what all new poets should—naturally—be
writing.
Roberts’s review of Spender’s Poems is more emphatic in its praise, and even goes on to
directly link the Listener to Spender’s burgeoning career: ‘Mr Spender’s book, short though it is,
more than fulfils the promise of the poems which have appeared in the Listener and elsewhere.’64
61 [F. R. Leavis], ‘The Listener's Book Chronicle: The Orators. By W. H. Auden. Tomorrow Will Be Different. By
Daniel George’, The Listener, 22 June 1932, p. 906.
62 [Leavis], ‘Book Chronicle: The Orators’.
63 [Leavis], ‘Book Chronicle: The Orators’.
64 [Michael Roberts], ‘The Listener's Book Chronicle: Poems. By Stephen Spender’, The Listener, 1 February 1933,
p. 190.
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For Roberts, Spender’s key achievement is that his work reconciles two very different schools in
modern poetry.
In recent years we have been faced with two contrasting schools of poets: those who, content to use
the existing means, spoke with an accent not their own, and those who, determined not to be
misunderstood, wrote poems which, if they were to be understood at all, were to be understood
only as the writers intended. The former found themselves restricted to saying again that which
had already been said; the latter could voice only that which was far removed from ordinary
experience. We had, on the one hand, ‘poetical’ poetry and, on the other, ‘difficult’. Mr Spender is
neither ‘poetical’ nor ‘difficult’.65
Spender achieves ‘sincerity’; he does not write ‘the poems of a clique’, and among ‘the poverty
and muddled policies and magnificent machines’, Spender understands ‘the certain promise of
enduring change’. This is clearly a reference to the socialist views held by Spender and other
Auden generation poets, and indeed the idea that these thirties poets were politically engaged—
as previous modernist poets were not—runs throughout the early reception of these poets.
My point is that Roberts’s review at once acknowledges the influence of earlier
modernist poetry on Spender while arguing that Spender’s work transcends divisions in literary
culture. This may develop a wider public awareness of the changing shape of modernist poetry,
but it also effectively ventriloquizes manifesto-like arguments for the work of Spender and his
contemporaries. While the review of Roberts’s 1933 anthology, New Country, is written by Leavis,
it takes a strikingly similar tack. Leavis argues that while New Signatures ‘made us aware of a new
school of poetry with a certain coherence of aim showing clearly above the interest of the
individual poems’, New Country ‘is a much more significant manifesto’.66 The review then goes
on to make that manifesto clear:
They are concerned with the modern poet’s position in a world of all-invading political issues,
more particularly with the issue of Communism. […] Proletarian realism of the effective kind has
not found a place for the kind of art which these poets, in common with others not so politically
minded, instinctively practise; for the revolutionary, all art is idealist dope for which the exigencies
of political action leave no place. There is no such thing as proletarian art, and if ever such a thing
is to exist, it must wait for the establishment of proletarian society. Meanwhile the poet must
express himself within the categories of the established tradition.67
65 [Roberts], ‘Book Chronicle: Spender, Poems’.
66 [F. R. Leavis], ‘The Listener's Book Chronicle: New Country. Edited by Michael Roberts’, The Listener, 12 April
1933, pp. 602-03 (p. 602).
67 [Leavis], ‘Book Chronicle: New Country’, p. 602.
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The review morphs from a simple description of an element of the new poetics of the Auden
group (they are exploring the boundaries between poetry and politics) to an argument that takes
on the voice of a New Country-style manifesto, ventriloquizing words that might be spoken by the
Auden poets themselves. Whether or not this represents an authentic representation of New
Country poetics is besides the point; the review takes on the language of a left-wing political
argument (proletarian, revolutionary) and becomes something which does not assess the Auden
group but identifies itself as part of that group, or, at least, as that group’s voice.
At the same time, the Listener was quick to criticize anthologies that paid little attention
to the poetry it favoured. Henry Newbolt’s Mercury Book of Verse is heavily criticized for claiming
to represent a period without bias towards any particular poetics. The Listener suggests that this
is
a strange claim, surely, for a collection that does not contain a single line of T. S. Eliot (who,
whatever views you may hold as to his permanent merits, has had more influence on the younger
generation of poets and literary critics than any of his contemporaries), nor anything really
representative of Mr Eliot’s inspired followers, and nothing of either of the Sitwells.68
Lascelles Abercrombie’s New English Poems comes in for similar criticism:
We optimistically refuse to believe that the state of poetry in England to-day is as complacently
mediocre as this volume would represent it to be. […] The truth is that no book as unmindful as
this is of the school of T. S. Eliot can honestly be called ‘representative of the art of English poetry
to-day’ and, since so many of the livelier brains and acutest sensibilities have joined that school,
neither can it hope to mirror the contemporary spirit.69
Anthologies are important, as Leonard Diepeveen argues: ‘modern poetry anthologies […]
record a struggle about an emergent entity and the conditions under which that entity—which
became known as modernism—might be known, represented, and archived’.70 As we have seen,
Smith’s own anthology pruned Listener poets to give greater prominence to the Auden
generation; as reviewer of new poetry, the Listener dismissed anthologies that ignored
modernism while seeming to act as full-throated advocate for those which gave it prominent
space.
68 ‘The Listener's Book Chronicle: Mercury Verse’, The Listener, 15 July 1931, p. 113.
69 ‘The Listener's Book Chronicle: New English Poems’, The Listener, 13 January 1932, p. 64.
70 Leonard Diepeveen, ‘When Did Modernism Begin? Formulating Boundaries in the Modern Anthology’, English
Studies in Canada, 30 (2004), 137-56 (p. 137).
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173
It could not be said that the Listener—or Smith—behaved improperly or wrongly in any
of these activities. The magazine published, reviewed and anthologized poetry; Smith knew
precisely what she liked, and her preferences influenced her editorial practice. Such behaviour
only aligns Smith with influential literary editors of this period: John Middleton Murry, or T. S.
Eliot. Yet as editor of a weekly review, or to be more precise an unusual periodical aspiring to
the condition of weekly review, the Listener’s full-throated promotion of Auden generation
poetry is unusual, to say the least. As I have argued throughout, these magazines envisaged
themselves as neutral, authoritative evaluators of literary culture. Even if such a position was
never tenable in practice, the Listener troubled the idea, by publishing a wide range of new
poetry and then taking, in its reviews, a very specific line on that poetry. As a final example, this
is best seen not in the positive reviews of modernist poets, but in the ways in which the Listener
reads poets with an ambiguous relationship to modernism. The Listener published Richard
Church’s ‘Latterday Eurydice’ in February 1932; the poem would later be included in his
volume News from the Mountain.71 It is a long poem for a weekly magazine—one of the longest
published by the Listener in this period. Here, the poem’s voice describes the pain of parting
from his or her lover, as they take an escalator into an underground station:
I watched you vanish down the escalator,
Gliding transfixed, an elegy of motion.
Who, in that mad, electric universe
Could think two lovers parted thus, their hearts
Aching with faith and the deep burden of joy? (ll. 1-5)72
The metrical pattern is not typical for Church, who tended to write in rhyming couplets.73 The
subject matter, however, is resolutely old-fashioned, posing the poem as a lover’s lament and
alluding to classical myth with the mention of Eurydice in the poem’s title. But that mention of
‘Latterday’ alerts the reader to a focus on modernity, a sense which is immediately heightened
71 Richard Church, News from the Mountain (Letchworth: The Temple Press, 1932), pp. 58-60.
72 Richard Church, ‘Latterday Eurydice’, The Listener, 24 February 1932, p. 280. References to this poem are given
by line number after quotation in the text.
73 For example, the first poem published in the Listener began ‘Not utterly complete | My solitude was sweet; | But
my dear companion | Must needs abandon’. See Richard Church, ‘The Anchorite's Lament’, The Listener, 11
February 1931, p. 244.
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174
by the use of ‘escalator’, a word that was only thirty years old at the time of publication.74 While
the poem presents itself on the page as unrhymed blank verse, and is indeed largely written in
iambic pentameter, this first line is eleven syllables long. ‘Escalator’ itself is a slightly awkward
four syllables that gives the reader pause at the end of the line. Moreover, it seems just plausible
that the motion of the lover away from the poem’s point of view, moving yet not, ‘gliding
transfixed’ recalls some of the ways in which modernist artists attempt to capture motion in a
still painting; Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 is perhaps the most famous
and relevant example.
This poem, then, is both modern and not, forcing itself to confront the trappings of
modernity but remaining fundamentally anxious about their use. At the same time, the two
lovers dream of a simpler time together.
The secret intimations of understanding
Which make the world again grow young and simple,
A trysting-place between the day and night
With hemispheres of dew, birdjoy, blossom,
And songs of morning when proud kings and poets
Went indistinguishable in their crowns
To take their white princesses to their hearts
And thus set forth to achieve kingdoms, and song! (ll. 10-17)
The image of the lovers together is figured as a space that escapes time, tinged with the imagery
and vocabulary (‘dew, birdjoy, blossom’) of an older and simpler poetry. Here, poets are quite
literally indistinguishable from kings, both taking part in a quest towards kingdoms, princesses,
and song. The direct references to ‘poets’ and ‘song’ turn the poem’s attention not just to
modernity, but to modernist poetry, and as much as the narrator yearns for this prelapsarian
poetry, it does not seem possible. Church goes on to construct a simplistic yet effective analogy
that compares the underground station to hell itself:
Ah! As motionless you vanished into hell,
Into the bright electric hell of underground
Where stood the slot-machines for sentinels
With lips of brass, and all their harsh viscera
Exposed beneath their belly-walls of glass,
Lamplit and shameless, gurgitating coins; (ll. 18-23)
74 OED, ‘escalator, n.’, sense 1.a. The word is first noted in the US in 1900, but not in the UK until 1910.
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Underground as underworld; the poem’s use of Eurydice as a kind of ancestor myth is clear. Of
course, for a modern poem to distrust modernity even as it sees a reaction to it as necessary is
not unusual. And as the lover vanishes, the world of ‘poets and kings’ seems less viable:
modernity may be divisive and distrusted, but a poetry that responds to it seems necessary. Yet
the force of that earlier evocation of a ‘trysting-place’ remains, such that (like the overlong first
line) the motion towards modernism remains awkward and unresolved. Church is neither
striding definitely towards a new poetry nor manning the barricades to defend an antimodernist
poetics, but hesitantly gesturing at an inevitable modernism that he does not seem enamoured
by.
When News from the Mountain is reviewed in the Listener a few months later, the reviewer
takes up this hesitant move towards modernism and argues for it as an unambiguously positive
thing:
Admirers of Mr Church’s poetry will have watched with interest his endeavours, during the last
year or so, to give his work the freedom of a larger form than had conditioned it hitherto. […] Mr
Church is a worker in pastel who begins to feel a chisel in his hands. The development, the
increase in power, in these longer poems can scarcely be overlooked even by the severest critic; and
it is no essential indictment to say they do not stand being subdued to a muffled theme or being
packed out with lyrics of a blameless nineteenth-century quality. To come upon any one of them,
after an arid stretch of the shorter verses, is to realise at once that the dryness is one of husk rather
than heart: much is to be forgiven a poet who makes a few false mental steps in the excitement of
approaching by instinct the core of his creative faculty. News from the Mountain may be unsatisfactory
as a book (though readable to a degree) but as an augury it is full of signs and portents.75
Instead of the awkward wavering in ‘Latterday Eurydice’, Church’s new poetry becomes an
‘endeavour’: he is ‘a worker in pastel who begins to feel a chisel in his hands.’ This draws on
modernist imagery of the poet as sculptor, and places Church on one side of a clear binary.76
Older poetic forms are figured as dull and dry, and Church’s missteps are thus forgiveable
because they are an ‘augury’: modernism is apparently going to win out in the end. Even if
‘Latterday Eurydice’ does not offer the clear omens that this review ascribes to News from the
Mountain as a volume, I am not suggesting that this review is necessarily misreading Church’s
poetry, merely that the publication of this poem and then, a few months later, the review,
75 ‘The Listener's Book Chronicle: News From the Mountain. By Richard Church’, The Listener, 21 September
1932, pp. 426-27.
76 Michael H. Whitworth, Reading Modernist Poetry (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), pp. 27-28.
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illustrates a clear commitment to promoting modernism in poetry that goes far beyond the task
proposed by Eliot, that of the magazine as a mere public record of contemporary writing.
Instead, the Listener concurrently hosts new poetry and, through reviews, attempts to shape a
way of reading that poetry that almost always praises modernism.
*
These reviews, and their relationship to the poetry that Smith was publishing, clearly
carve out a space in the Listener that argues for the Auden generation. Given what we know of
the weekly review, it might be suggested that such actions pushed the boundaries of Smith’s
responsibilities as assistant editor. It is hard to argue that the literary editor of the Listener was
intended to encourage and explore the new poetry of a single group of poets to quite this extent.
In Chapter 2, I explored the problem of an editor who disliked his job; here we are faced with
the problem of an editor who rebelled against her superiors. Once again, this has theoretical
ramifications, made clear in Matthew Philpotts’ essay on Bourdieusian habitus and literary
editors. Philpotts usefully argues that habitus (‘a deeply ingrained but readily transferable set of
attitudes which generates the perceptions and practices of individual agents in the field’) can be
applied to periodicals, as well as to individuals.77 Following Bourdieu’s work on Gide and the
Nouvelle Revue Française, Philpotts suggests that
a literary journal is characterized by what we can identify as its own ‘common habitus’, the
defining ethos which unites the members of its ‘nucleus’ and which acts as ‘a unifying and
generative principle’ for their cultural practice. In turn, this simple theoretical move has three key
consequences for the argument developed in this essay. First, and of broadest significance for the
study of periodicals, it follows that the literary journal can be conceptualized as an agent in its own
right, participating in the cultural field in the acquisition and exchange of capital in its various
forms: literary, economic, and social; material and symbolic. The role of the editor, then, is to
maximize the sums of capital acquired and maintained by the journal.78
While powerful, this point of view depends utterly on the assumption that the literary journal as
agent is a broadly collaborative entity, and that the editor acts as the focal point for the
journal’s wider intentions. In Leonard Woolf’s case, it is clear that this point is null and void;
77 Matthew Philpotts, ‘The Role of the Periodical Editor: Literary Journals and Editorial Habitus’, Modern Language
Review, 107 (2012), 39-64 (p. 42).
78 Philpotts, ‘Editorial Habitus’, p. 42.
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rather than focalizing wider intentions, he disliked his job but nevertheless guarded a space for
critics to think about modernism. The case of the Listener is very different, and it seems at least
plausible that a literary journal might participate in the cultural field as an agent even if its
habitus is not unified or collaborative. I contend that the Listener’s publication of new poetry
(especially the 1933 poetry supplement) represents just such a rebellious intervention,
confounding the notion of common habitus and threatening to fracture the identity that the BBC
imagined for its new magazine.
Reith’s criticism of the poetry in 1933 is a perfect example. The mere existence of
Eliot’s report implies a wish to paper over cracks at the BBC, and to gently argue for a
reconciliation between cultural viewpoints that were in many ways ultimately divergent.
Moreover, conflicting narratives exist which suggest that the combative nature of the BBC was
not as simple as the Listener’s modernism against Reith’s conservatism. Peter Parker paints
Richard Lambert as the voice of Reithian conservatism, apt to be fooled by a wily Janet Adam
Smith:
Knowing that Lambert was as likely as Reith to be suspicious of poem like Auden’s ‘The
Witnesses’, she [Smith] waited until he had returned from a good lunch, then presented him with a
sheet of poems, at the top of which was the most innocuous and easily understandable of the batch.
As Lambert cast a woozy eye over the page, Adam Smith would engage him in conversation so
that he rarely bothered to read the entire sheet before passing the poem for publication.79
Lambert, by contrast, presents himself as a cautious advocate for modernism against Reith.
With tongue firmly in cheek, he suggests that the architecture of the new Broadcasting House,
and Eric Gill’s statues of Prospero and Ariel in particular, are evidence that ‘the BBC had no
bias towards aesthetic orthodoxy. And as Sir John Reith had thus blazoned the trail towards
modernism, I felt that the Listener might safely follow a little way in his footsteps’.80
‘Safely follow a little way’: this is precisely the tone that we have come to expect from
the weekly review. If it examines modernism, it does so carefully, always considering how new
79 Peter Parker, Ackerley: A Life of J. R. Ackerley (London: Constable, 1989), p. 185.
80 Lambert, Ariel and All His Quality, pp. 138-39. Reith was not of course a fan of Gill’s Prospero and Ariel: Fiona
MacCarthy writes of ‘the scandal of Ariel’s pudenda: the governors of the BBC, after a preview of the carving
behind a tarpaulin, asked Gill to make the organs more diminutive’. See Fiona MacCarthy, Eric Gill (London:
Faber and Faber, 1989), p. 247. Sadly, a story that Reith climbed Gill’s scaffolding and attempted to personally
chisel off the offending genitalia seems to be apocryphal.
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ideas might soon become a part of official culture. It is the tone, too, of T. S. Eliot’s report: the
publication of brash young poets as a generous, paternalistic gesture towards future literary
history. My point, though, is that the Listener did not ‘safely follow a little way’. It did not simply
attempt to take modernism seriously, but under Smith embraced the challenge of publishing
and reviewing new poetry. Whether or not one takes Smith’s point of view—and given the now
secure position of Auden in literary history, it is easy to agree with her—her behaviour as
assistant editor to publish and promote the Auden generation was not uncontroversial, and
Reith’s unease at the poetry supplement was not simply a storm in a teacup. Smith was testing
the boundaries of what could be achieved in a weekly review, challenging the identity of the
Listener, and in many ways the BBC had every right to worry.
All weekly reviews are of course a network of overlapping influences and agendas. This
can be seen at the Nation and Athenaeum—Keynes’s committed Liberalism against Woolf’s
professional apathy—and at Time and Tide, as the politically feminist programme sat sometimes
uncomfortably with the literary pages. It is less evident at the Spectator, with its anomalously
unified identity. But at the Listener, different members of staff pushed for different things, and
the paper’s overall identity was formed from the complex and unclear collision between
different agents within the magazine. This periodical was caught between its own journalistic
intent and the desire of the Talks Department, source of its broadcast scripts, to keep it as a
‘Hansard for Talks’.81 It was overseen by Reith and his senior management, whenever it was
perceived to have stepped out of line. And it was altered, internally, by Smith’s actions as
assistant editor.
As with the Nation and Athenaeum, it might thus be profitable to understand the Listener
spatially. In this context, Janet Adam Smith’s work as editor was a form of spatial practice that
established, within the frame of this BBC weekly review, a rebellious space that argued for
81 Lambert makes the Hansard comparison in his memoir, though it was a common refrain in the corporation’s
musings on the Listener. Cohen clearly documents how the Listener and the Talks Department clashed regularly over
the access the paper had to scripts, and the extent to which it was permitted to edit them. Lambert, Ariel and All His
Quality, p. 106; Cohen, ‘Intermediality’, pp. 577-78.
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modernism. Crucially, this does not make the Listener into a modernist magazine. If this is a
rebellious spatial practice, it is a practice that rebels within its institutional context, that of an
institution that was trying—quite desperately—to look like a respectable weekly review. The
poetry supplement aside, it is also a spatial practice that, like most editorial practices associated
with the weekly review, is rooted in the everyday, not the event: the appearance of one short
poem on a small section of one page, each week, and every few weeks a single paragraph
reviewing new poetry. Smith’s rebellious spatial practice might be read alongside Michel de
Certeau’s famous discussion, in The Practice of Everyday Life (1984), of the potentially subversive
nature of walking in the city.
One can analyse the microbe-like, singular and plural practices which an urbanistic system was
supposed to administer or suppress, but which have outlived its decay; one can follow the
swarming activity of these procedures that, far from being regulated or eliminated by panoptic
administration, have reinforced themselves in a proliferating illegitimacy, developed and insinuated
themselves into the networks of surveillance, and combined in accord with unreadable but stable
tactics to the point of constituting everyday regulations and surreptitious creativities that are
merely concealed by the frantic mechanisms and discourses of the observational organization.82
De Certeau’s walkers are able to tactically subvert the overall controlling strategies of the city:
these are ‘multiform, resistance, tricky and stubborn procedures that elude discipline without
being outside the field in which it is exercised’.83 Rephrasing de Certeau for a mainstream
periodical, the particular importance of this perspective is that it permits a dual focus: on the
institution of the Listener and the weekly review more generally, and on the rebellions within
that institution. These rebellions do not challenge the overall institutional fabric, but this makes
them no less significant.
This concept might be applied to Listener poetry in different ways. First, de Certeau’s
focus on the tactical potential of everyday spatial practice emphasizes the power that individual
readers have to read the Listener as they will. They can pass over the poems in disgust—a
possibility examined by Smith’s 1933 editorial on modernist poetry, discussed in the
Introduction—just as they can choose to read the Listener for its poems alone. As de Certeau
82 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. by Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1984), p. 96.
83 de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, p. 96.
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writes, ‘readers are travellers; they move across lands belonging to someone else, like nomads
poaching their way across fields they did not write, despoiling the wealth of Egypt to enjoy it
themselves’.84 By developing a space for modernist poetry within the Listener, Smith not only
permits but arguably encourages such rebellious practices.
But one can go further, and see Smith herself as a reader of the magazine’s institutional
strategies, and as a member of that institution that uses poetry and poetry reviews in a
rebellious fashion. Different aspects of Smith’s practice as editor—her overall desire to publish
the Auden generation, her everyday practice to source and select poems and reviewers, her
reaction to opposition as she reached out to T. S. Eliot to defend the poetry supplement—
combine to establish Listener poetry as a dissonant element within the Listener, one with
‘surreptitious creativities’ that is nonetheless contained within the weekly review.
To this point, I have considered how the institution of the weekly review reads the
emerging form of modernist literature, and how such interpretations themselves formed a key
element in modernism’s emergence into public culture in Britain. Janet Adam Smith’s
rebellious practice as editor demands a slightly different perspective. Rather than offering
cautious analysis of how modernism might fit into official culture, the Listener effectively
dramatizes the conflict between the new poetry that Smith promotes and the institution of the
weekly review. In Smith’s 1933 editorial, for example, the tone may address the sceptical reader,
as is common for the weekly review. This piece is most similar to Leonard Woolf’s discussion of
modern poetry in 1925:
It is easy to put on the black cap and, calling the names of Alfred Tennyson and William
Wordsworth, to pronounce all this nonsense and not poetry.85
But Smith’s editorial contains a potential undertone of scorn.
Obviously, many think, if you have eyes to read Bradshaw you have eyes to read poetry: and so
when they do come across a poem they are aggrieved if it does not immediately please—blandly
84 de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, p. 174.
85 Leonard Woolf, ‘The World of Books: Modern Poetry’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 18 April 1925, p. 76.
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unconscious of the fact that a fine sensibility to poetry is probably as uncommon a gift, and as hard
an acquisition, as a fine sensibility to music or painting.86
The sceptical reader is taken seriously by the overall thrust of the magazine, and of the review,
but mocked and dismissed in these tiny flashes of criticism in Smith’s editorial. Here, one might
again turn to de Certeau, and his distinction between strategy and tactic: if the strategy of the
Listener is to take that sceptical reader seriously, Smith’s tactical move is to dismiss them, at
small moments in her poetry reviews.
Crucially, she suggests that modernism emerges into public culture not only when the
cautious weekly review collaborates with the reader (to explore whether or not modernism
deserves a place in official culture) but also, sometimes, when it opposes the reader. By rebelling
against the strictures of the weekly review, within the structure of that same review, Smith
presents readers of the Listener with a series of challenging poems that drive a debate about the
place of modernist poetry in a magazine like this, and hence a debate about the nature of
modernism, and its place in wider literary culture. Smith’s readers, with their own de
Certeauesque tactical readings, can of course ignore the poems. But if they choose to read them,
the nature of the weekly review means that the reader is inevitably challenged by those poems,
a fact of no small significance.
*
What, then, of the 1933 poetry supplement itself? Smith’s retrospective article calls
attention equally to the poems, and to the images that surround the poetry, describing ‘Nine
Poems’ as ‘a four-page supplement of poetry and woodcuts’.87 The woodcuts were by Gwen
Raverat, a granddaughter of Charles Darwin who knew many of the Apostles in pre-war
Cambridge, and would later write art criticism and provide illustrations for Time and Tide in the
thirties, as well as illustrating books of poetry and later writing a popular memoir, Period Piece
(1952).88 Wood engraving was her preferred medium, and she would describe it as being ‘hard,
86 [Smith], ‘“Modernist” Poetry’.
87 Smith, ‘T. S. Eliot’.
88 Frances Spalding, Gwen Raverat: Friends, Family & Affections (London: Pimlico, 2004), pp. 323-24. See also DNB.
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tight, definite’ and having ‘no room for vagueness’.89 The images in the Listener are striking,
unlike anything seen before or after in that magazine, or indeed any of its contemporaries. A
title woodcut on the first page gives the supplement title in bold sans serif, showing a windswept
mountain range, two gesturing human figures, and a nude figure pinned by a giant bird
(presumably in reference to John Hewitt’s ‘Anti-Promethean Ode’). The last page has a small
cut of a factory, a walled city, and a biplane. Poems from C. Day Lewis, John Hewitt, Herbert
Read, Bernard Spencer, John Lehmann, T. H. White, Charles Madge and Arthur Ball take up
these first and last pages.90
But it is the central woodcut that remains the most striking image. Frances Spalding,
Raverat’s biographer, describes it as a ‘bold response to W. H. Auden’s highly allusive poem’.91
The poem is ‘The Witnesses’, likely composed during late 1932 and published here for the first
time.92 This particular publication has largely escaped critical notice, beyond acknowledgments
by Tolley and Cunningham that the Listener was an important venue for Auden. Andrew
Thacker, in a recent essay on Auden and periodicals that mentions the Listener as an outlet for
Auden, is of course correct to describe the periodical as a ‘middlebrow and financially stable
institution’, but ‘The Witnesses’ itself should not be understood in this way.93 As Thacker
rightly emphasizes, returning texts to their original place of publication means that we read
‘different poems, with different meanings’.94 We have to pay attention not just to ‘other themes
and issues in the magazine’, but ‘size, design and typography’.95 To read the Listener against
89 Gwen Raverat, quoted in Spalding, Gwen Raverat, p. 323.
90 A full list of titles on the outer pages: C. Day Lewis, ‘Demigods and Heroes’; John Hewitt, ‘Anti-Promethean
Ode’; Bernard Spencer, ‘How Must We Live?’; Herbert Read, ‘Logos’; John Lehmann, ‘As the Day Burns On’; T.
H. White, ‘A Dray Horse’; Charles Madge, ‘Birdseye’; Arthur Ball, ‘The Spirit’s Arming’. See ‘Nine Poems’.
91 Spalding, Gwen Raverat, p. 323.
92 The Witnesses as printed in the Listener is collected in Mendelson’s The English Auden (pp. 126-30). On its textual
history, ‘The poem first appears in Auden’s notebook as an inset in a long, unfinished dream-vision poem in
Cantos which dates from September 1932 to around January 1933. Auden used a slightly cut version of the third
part of the present text in The Chase and The Dog Beneath the Skin.’ W. H. Auden, The English Auden: Poems, Essays and
Dramatic Writings 1927-1939, ed. by Edward Mendelson (London: Faber and Faber, 1986), p. 423. Further
references to this poem are given by line number after quotation in the text.
93 Andrew Thacker, ‘Auden and Little Magazines’, in W. H. Auden in Context, ed. by Tony Sharpe (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 337-46 (p. 338).
94 Thacker, ‘Auden and Little Magazines’, p. 337.
95 Thacker, ‘Auden and Little Magazines’, p. 344.
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Raverat’s image, as an example of Smith’s editorial practice within the magazine, invites an
exploration of how this poem might challenge the reader.
‘The Witnesses’ is printed in four columns, with Raverat’s woodcut surrounding it on
the left and right and rearing up in a large central image that threatens to overwhelm the text.
The image is of ‘the Two’, the huge standing stones that dominate part III of the poem:
You are the town, and we are the clock,
We are the guardians of the gate in the rock,
the Two;
On your left, and on your right
In the day, and in the night
we are watching you. (ll. 120-25)
Towards these two, huge stones, two lines of people stream, from a church or castle on the left,
and from a modern city with office blocks and factories on the right. As they approach the
stones, the figures, fall, crawl, die and decay, becoming briefly skeletal in a few examples before
merging with the stones that thrust up into the sky. It is a confusing and complex clash of
modernity and ancient ritual, with the common threat and fact of violence underpinning the
whole composite image.
Raverat must have seen Auden’s text, as the images react to the poem; not only the
anthropomorphized standing stones, but the combination of romantic imagery—princes and
quests—with the modern world. Having said this, the woodcut bears the closest resemblance to
the last section of the poem, with its threats of violence and image of ‘the Two’. The first two
sections—which occupy three of the four columns—take a less serious and violent tone that has
a complex relationship to the later lines. These two sections have a narrative that echoes heroic
epic: part I addresses itself to an audience, conceived variously, from ‘dowagers with Roman
noses’ to ‘Solicitors with poker faces’ and ‘stokers lit by furnace-glare’ (ll. 1, 7, 13). While this
invocation of audience is, of course, a key element of epic poetry, it might also—in the context
of the Listener—be read as an address to the reader of the weekly review. It is they who are
asked to ‘listen well’ to a ‘story’ (ll. 25-27), a poetic narrative that does not simply make a case
for modernism, but seems to undermine the reader’s ability to interpret and evaluate poetry.
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Part II of Auden’s poem introduces a protagonist:
Call him Prince Alpha if you wish
He was born in a palace, his people were swish;
his christening
Was called by the Tatler the event of the year,
All the photographed living were there
and the dead were listening. (ll. 31-36)
Could—or should—this be described as modernist? It keeps to a regular stanzaic form. It
rhymes. It even has a narrative that seems to update a classic form for the present day. These
are of course unsophisticated tests that oversimplify the issue: Auden was a poet both heavily
influenced by Eliot and enamoured, throughout his career, by strict stanzaic form. However,
these are the tests that—in these periodicals at least—were generally applied to new, non-
traditional poetry. The problem with applying these tests to ‘The Witnesses’ is that the poem
does not simply tell a poetic narrative within a strict form.
The poem oscillates uneasily between two very different moods: a blithe and cheery
description of an uncomplicated hero, and a growing awareness of an unpleasant undercurrent.
This oscillation is there in narrative—the conscious introduction of the listening dead at the end
of the stanza—but also, more significantly, in form. The end-rhymes are uncomfortably full
(wish/swish), and even polysyllabic (christening/listening). This oscillation only becomes more
evident if we see it as playing with expectations for conservative poetry, expecting rhyme and
narrative but realising as the poem develops that that very expectation for rhyme is being
manipulated, and made into an uncomfortable locus of tension rather than poetic tradition.
‘Prince Alpha’—as one expects of a hero in epic poetry—goes adventuring (‘He rescued
maidens, overthrew | ten giants’ (ll. 73-74)) before coming to sit by ‘Two tall rocks as black as
pride | on either side’ (ll. 82-83). There he gains a sudden self-awareness, cries out his strength
and fame are meaningless (in another polysyllabic rhyme, ‘I thought my strength could know
no stemming | But I was foolish as a lemming’ (ll. 90-91)), and wishes to die. And he gains his
wish:
There in the desert all alone
He sat for hours on a long flat stone
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and sighed;
Above the blue sky arching wide
Two black rocks on either side,
and then he died. (ll. 102-06)
It is at this point that the poem begins to rapidly modulate in tone. It again addresses the reader
directly (‘Now ladies and gentlemen’ (l. 108)) and the voice of the poem takes on a character
and makes itself plural: ‘Listen, while my friend and I | proceed to explain’ (ll. 112-13). The
final column, the third part of the poem, makes clear that this plural voice is ‘The Witnesses’ of
the poem’s title, the two standing stones gifted with malevolent intelligence and magical power.
They continue to speak to the reader, suggesting that ‘I shouldn’t dance’ (l. 149):
For I’m afraid in that case you’ll have a fall;
We’ve been watching you over the garden wall
for hours,
The sky is darkening like a stain,
Something is going to fall like rain
and it won’t be flowers. (ll. 150-55)
The threatening undercurrent of violence has exploded out to dominate the poem, which now
attempts to speak to, threaten and manipulate the reader.
Except it does not quite manage this. The form and content, which before undercut the
idyllic heroics of Prince Alpha, here undercut the threatening rhetoric of the Two. They watch
not from a great distance, but over a garden wall. The sky may be darkening, but it resembles
something as inconsequential as a ‘stain’. The last line in this stanza has threatening overtones,
but amounts to little more than a promise to not drop flowers. The uncomfortable (and
sometimes polysyllabic) rhymes continue: fall/wall and stain/rain, hours/flowers.
‘The Witnesses’, then, continually plays with and manipulates the reader’s expectations.
Certainly, at no point does the poem contain the violence and threat of Raverat’s illustrations.
Auden’s careful moves towards bathos in the last part of the poem continue to undercut the
reader’s impression of the poem’s mood and narrative, a mood only heightened by Raverat’s
never-quite-suitable images. Here, modernist poetry does not just innovate with poetic form
and metre, but places pressure on that cultural awareness of the divide between modernist and
anti-modernist impulses; placed against a presumed conservative reader, the poem gains an
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awareness of an expectation of narrative and rhyme, which it then refuses to quite fulfil,
manipulating the reader and leaving them aware of this fact. Again, I do not wish to suggest
that the poem was conceived to operate in this way, given that it was written in 1932; merely
that when placed against the peculiar place of modernist poetry in the Listener, the poem has
potential to work in just this way. Just as the weekly poems placed by Smith are energized by
their rebellious appearance in a more conservative surround, Auden’s poem, in this
extraordinary supplement, can be seen to take that power relationship and make poetry from it.
In the Listener, then, Smith rebelled against the institution of the weekly review in order
to publish the Auden generation. In this context, Auden’s ‘The Witnesses’ can be read as
occupying this dissonance. Against the weekly review’s usual desire to take the sceptical reader
seriously, this poem delights in toying with such a reader, seeming to offer clear poetic
structures and narrative, but always undermining that offer, and tending ultimately towards
bathos. The very readers that the BBC hoped to entice in to read the Listener—those who pay
proper attention to serious broadcast talks, and read their Spectator from cover to cover—are
here not taken seriously as participants in a conversation about modern literature, but are, as it
were, the butt of Auden’s joke. Recalling Thacker’s argument about Auden in periodicals, this
is how Auden’s poem is quite drastically different when read in the context of the Listener.
What consequence, finally, does ‘The Witnesses’ in the Listener have for the emergence
of modernism into public culture? It is not simply the regular appearance of modernist poetry
in a periodical with an average weekly circulation (in 1933) of 42,627 copies, significant though
this no doubt was.96 To return to Hacking, I have argued throughout that our processes of
naming and classifying interact with those things that we name and classify. This is at its
clearest when it is broadly collaborative—when the magazine and its imagined reader seem to
come together in a mutual desire to understand the nature of modern literature. But it occurs
throughout Smith’s editorship too. Tactical subversions of the strategy of a weekly review may
96 See Appendix B.
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be read as rebellious, but they must be understood within the context of that weekly review. To
print ‘The Witnesses’, or other Auden generation poetry, is thus both a rebellion against the
weekly review and a demand that such content be read as part of that weekly review. Naming
and classifying Auden generation poetry—a process that changes the concept of the Auden
generation, and by extension modernism—thus does not take place collaboratively between
reader and review, but in awkward unclear combat, as readers wrestle with the place of these
texts in this type of magazine. As they wrestle, modernism emerges ever more into public
culture. It is an uncomfortable, troubling process: in other words, as Director-General Reith
had every right to be concerned.
Yet it is also clear that Smith’s ability to successfully defend her editorial practice—the
fact alone that T. S. Eliot was accepted as an authority—speaks volumes about how much more
public, and publicly legitimate, the concept of modernism was by 1933. In the following and
final chapter, I explore the New Statesman, and this complex question of modernism’s place as a
now accepted element in official culture.
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5. THE NEW STATESMAN AND NATION, 1931-37
In October 1935, the New Statesman printed a review of F. O. Matthiessen’s new work of literary
criticism, The Achievement of T. S. Eliot.1 The reviewer, Desmond Hawkins, suggested that Eliot’s
poetry had become part of the literary tradition. This argument seems to imply the end of the
task posited by this thesis, to trace the emergence of modernism into public culture.
The title of Mr Matthiessen’s book comes as a reminder that the ‘terrible moderns’ are no longer
terrible. Mr Eliot has ceased to be the cult of the few and the joke of the many; and indeed it is
now unsafe, even in the Sunday papers, to make play with the obscurity of The Waste Land. A
generation has grown up which in adolescence read Eliot with no more fuss than any other poet.
The only difference lies in the degree of influence. It is true, I believe, that there is today in
England no younger poet deserving pen and paper who is not indebted, by more or less, to Eliot’s
work. […] Between poetic taste and practice in 1910, and in the present time, there is a degree of
difference amounting to revolution.2
Matthiessen’s Achievement was one of the first monographs on Eliot’s poetry, written while Eliot
had been resident at Harvard—where Matthiessen was a member of the faculty—for a series of
lectures in 1932.3 Not insignificantly, Lawrence Rainey has suggested that Eliot’s return to
Harvard for these lectures was ‘triumphant’ and would ‘seal the fateful association between
modernism and the academy’.4 Beyond the academy itself, one might also point to the rapid
increase of works on Eliot that occurred at this point in history, as a study of T. S. Eliot
bibliographies suggests.5 Indeed, Matthiessen treats the importance of Eliot’s poetry as a matter
of established fact.
1 As discussed in further detail below, the periodical founded as the New Statesman was published as the New
Statesman and Nation between 1931 and 1957, due to a merger with the Nation and Athenaeum. However, there were
greater continuities between the NSN and the New Statesman than there were with the Nation; to emphasize this, the
periodical is referred to simply as the New Statesman throughout.
2 A. Desmond Hawkins, ‘Mr Eliot’, The New Statesman and Nation, 5 October 1935, pp. 460-62 (p. 460).
3 F. O. Matthiessen, The Achievement of T. S. Eliot: An Essay on the Nature of Poetry (London: Oxford University Press,
1935).
4 Lawrence S. Rainey, Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1998), p. 105.
5 In the 1920s Eliot was discussed in between twenty and thirty articles per year: 22 in 1922, 18 in 1925, 28 in
1928. This rises at the end of the decade: there are 38 items for 1929, 55 for 1930, 81 for 1932, 118 for 1934.
While there is a slightly dip in 1937 (40 items), the overall trend is clear, and Hawkins’s article is clearly part of the
explosion. These numbers are calculated by combining figures from two major bibliographies. Both cover the
same period, and the work by Frank et al. is supplementary to Martin’s earlier work. The figures can thus be
combined without risk of duplication. See Mildred Martin, A Half-Century of Eliot Criticism: An Annotated Bibliography
of Books and Articles in English, 1916-65 (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1972); Mechthild Frank, Armin Paul
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Along these lines, Hawkins’s article—like Matthiessen’s book—might simply be taken as
further evidence that Eliot’s place in literary history as an elder statesman was now assured; one
might point to further comments in the magazine, from Virginia Woolf’s description of Eliot as
among the ‘tolerably old’ to David Garnett’s comparison of Eliot with Coleridge; from Peter
Quennell’s emphasis that ‘almost every modern critic has had his say’ on the value of Eliot’s
work, to his reference—with no need to mention a name—that Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood has
‘appeared under the aegis of the most eminent Anglo-Catholic poet of the present day’.6
Matthiessen’s book does indeed make this argument: apart from a momentary
acknowledgement that Eliot used to be ‘experimental’, his canonical status is taken as
unquestionable.7 These arguments do not just canonize Eliot but begin to characterize him as
the very model of canonical respectability. They are early forays in a line of argument
ultimately taken up by Cynthia Ozick in 1989: Eliot as ‘an autocratic, inhibited, depressed,
rather narrow-minded, and considerably bigoted fake Englishman’.8 Not for nothing does
Rainey characterize the association of modernism, Eliot and the academy as ‘fateful’.
Retroactively, one might expect to see an earlier Eliot as a type of artist, as Fredric
Jameson puts it, ‘waiting patiently in line for a room in […] a museum’; this is certainly Ozick’s
position.9 It is curious, then, that in an article that seemingly argues so clearly for Eliot’s
canonicity so much should be dedicated to recounting what Eliot used to be but is no longer:
‘the cult of the few and the joke of the many.’ Even now, the omnipresence of Eliot in
anthologies and literary histories means that this sense of Eliot as rebellious poet can be hard to
Frank and K. P. S. Jochum, T. S. Eliot Criticism in English, 1916-1965: A Supplementary Bibliography (Edmonton: Yeats
Eliot Review, 1977).
6 Virginia Woolf, ‘All About Books’, The New Statesman and Nation, 28 February 1931, pp. 14-15; David Garnett,
‘Books in General’, The New Statesman and Nation, 4 August 1934, p. 154; Peter Quennell, ‘Mr T. S. Eliot’, The New
Statesman and Nation, 18 April 1936, pp. 603-04; Peter Quennell, ‘New Novels’, The New Statesman and Nation, 17
October 1936, pp. 592-93.
7 Matthiessen, The Achievement of T. S. Eliot, p. 1.
8 Cynthia Ozick, ‘T. S. Eliot at 101’, The New Yorker, 20 November 1989, pp. 119-54 (p. 121).
9 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), p. 302.
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recover. It is perhaps telling that Ozick’s essay was cited a number of times by Eliot scholars
wishing to defend their subject as a poet still worthy of study.10
Hawkins’s article might therefore be read not merely as evidence of Eliot’s canonical
status, but as a critical argument that emphasizes the immensity of the change that has taken
place: as he puts it, a ‘revolution’ has taken place. While the examples given above emphasize
Eliot’s orthodoxy, others, like Hawkins, always choose to recall that the new orthodoxy
represents a shift from what came before. One might draw attention to Peter Quennell’s
comment that Eliot ‘is now essentially orthodox’, or Julian Bell’s suggestion that Eliot has ‘the
air of being the real thing, safe to remain in the central corpus of English poetry’.11
Rather than merely dwelling on Eliot’s canonical status, these critics choose to perceive
that status as newly minted: Eliot is orthodox ‘now’, ‘safe’ now, with the inevitable implication
that all too recently he most certainly was not. In the Introduction, I quoted Perry Anderson’s
remarks on modernism as an ‘empty’ cultural category. In the same essay, Anderson argues
that modernism was able to emerge against a formalized, academicized official culture,
enshrined in a series of powerful cultural institutions.12 These critics propose a similar form of
official cultural status for modernism—for Hawkins, one feels, the ‘Sunday papers’ are one of
the key cultural institutions—but this proposal is always tentative. Modernism’s own role in
such an official culture is never quite secure, and remains always troubled by a revolutionary
avant-garde past. Put another way, Hawkins’s article does not assert canonicity but rather
brings it into question: Eliot’s status as canonical poet now is always haunted by his status as
rebellious and troubling literary outsider then. In many ways, this is the exact inverse of the
10 For example, Marjorie Perloff’s ‘Avant-Garde Eliot’ is a thoughtful discussion of ‘Prufrock’ in the context of
American poetry in 1910-11, and an attempt to rediscover the avant-garde nature of Eliot’s poetry, which takes
Ozick’s essay as part of a general trend. Sebastian Knowles’s appendix on Ozick in his bibliography is a more
direct, vituperative attack on Ozick’s claims. See Marjorie Perloff, 21st Century Modernism: The ‘New’ Poetics (Malden:
Blackwell, 2002), pp. 10-12; Sebastian D. G. Knowles and Scott A. Leonard, T. S. Eliot: Man and Poet: Volume 2, An
Annotated Bibliography of a Decade of T. S. Eliot Criticism: 1977-1986 (Orono: The National Poetry Foundation, 1992),
pp. 394-95.
11 Peter Quennell, ‘T. S. Eliot the Critic’, The New Statesman and Nation, 1 October 1932, pp. 377-78 (p. 378); [Julian
Bell], ‘Stewed Poetry’, The New Statesman and Nation, 17 February 1934, p. 242. ‘Stewed Poetry’ is initialled ‘J. H. B.’.
I ascribe this to Julian (Heward) Bell, a sometime New Statesman reviewer.
12 Perry Anderson, ‘Modernity and Revolution’, New Left Review, 144 (1984), 96-113. This perspective is heavily
influenced by Arno Mayer’s work on the pre-war ancien régime, also discussed in the Introduction.
THE NEW STATESMAN AND NATION, 1931-37
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problem explored by Marjorie Perloff in her essay ‘Avant-Garde Eliot’: for Perloff, ‘Prufrock’
marked ‘a clear-cut break with the dominant poetics of Eliot’s day’, but this poet then became
‘in just a few short years, the conservative editor of the Criterion, and then the Elder Statesman
of the Eliot legend’.13 For critics at the New Statesman in the early to mid thirties, Eliot’s early
avant-garde nature is not lost, but inescapable.
These critics—but Hawkins in particular—do not restrict themselves to Eliot but
generalize: what are we to make of the previously terrible moderns? What are we to do with the
condition of being—in a literary sense—modern? Despite the assertion of safe canonicity, such
gestures are troubling, and Hawkins’s argument has complex undertones: modernism’s past as
rebellious outsider haunts it still, and certain question marks remain. These questions orient
themselves around the status of modernism in 1935: for Hawkins it is at once no longer new but
not entirely unthreatening, moving towards obsolescence yet not superseded. This last chapter
will explore modernism’s cultural status in the 1930s, in a magazine that could never
successfully resolve the question of canonicity: the New Statesman. As Hawkins recognizes, to a
certain extent modernism was recognized as canonical, and this deserves and receives attention.
But the troubling undertones perceived in Hawkins’s review persist; rather than naming and
dating a moment of clear emergence and stable canonical status, I contend that, as for Hacking,
canonicity remains elusive and troubling.
*
This chapter opens as Kingsley Martin—who would turn out to be the paper’s most
famous and longest-serving editor—began his career. In 1931, this was still a new magazine:
the New Statesman was founded by a group of Fabian intellectuals in 1913, including George
Bernard Shaw and Beatrice and Sidney Webb.14 From this point on, the magazine was
13 Perloff, 21st Century Modernism, pp. 27-28.
14 For a general history of the New Statesman, see Edward Hyams, The New Statesman: The History of the First Fifty Years,
1913-1963 (London: Longmans, 1963). While useful, it should be noted that this work was produced for the
magazine’s half-centenary, and is thus a largely uncritical celebration of the New Statesman. For particular criticisms
of this work, see Denis Brogan, ‘A History of the “New Statesman”’, The Historical Journal, 8 (1965), 135-39. More
THE NEW STATESMAN AND NATION, 1931-37
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orientated broadly around the politics of the British left, as it continues to be today. The literary
pages were edited by Desmond MacCarthy throughout the twenties, and regularly featured
influential (male, established, and traditionalist) critics such as J. C. Squire, Gerald Gould and
Robert Lynd.15 Towards the end of the decade, however, the paper endured a problematic
period described by Edward Hyams as ‘the doldrums of a tedious calm’ as the paper’s first
major editor, Clifford Sharp, retreated further into alchoholism and his deputy, Mostyn Lloyd,
only ever replaced him on an acting basis.16 In late 1930, Kingsley Martin—who had just
moved to London after working on the Manchester Guardian—was appointed as editor of the New
Statesman. J. M. Keynes had tired of owning the still loss-making Nation and Athenaeum (as
discussed briefly in Chapter 2), and, having convinced himself that Martin would make a fine
editor, proposed that the two papers be brought together. Martin was editor of both papers for
a short time, but they were soon amalgamated, and the first issue of the renamed paper was
published on 28 February 1931.17 Traces of these other papers remained: for a time there was,
alongside the ‘and Nation’ in the title, the subtitle ‘incorporating the Athenaeum’. From 13
January 1934, this subtitle was altered to reflect the incorporation of the Week-end Review.18
However, while Keynes had apparently desired a ‘genuine union’, his paper was in reality
swallowed up. John Roberts, the New Statesman’s business manager, ‘intended that in every
respect the New Statesman should be on top’ and ‘Maynard confessed he came off second best in
the negotiations’.19
Hyams suggests that Martin injected an invigorating ‘anger’ into the paper.20 While it is
certainly true that Martin was influential and the paper sold well, he continued to develop an
upward trend rather than turning around a failing paper. As detailed in Appendix B, the New
recently, Adrian Smith has written a history of the magazine’s political half up to 1931: The New Statesman: Portrait of
a Political Weekly, 1913-1931 (London: Cass, 1996).
15 Hyams, The New Statesman, p. 95.
16 Hyams, The New Statesman, p. 101.
17 Kingsley Martin, Father Figures: A First Volume of Autobiography, 1897-1931 (London: Hutchinson & Co, 1966), pp.
188-99.
18 A small image of Athena, taken from the Athenaeum, remained on the front page.
19 Martin, Father Figures, p. 198.
20 Hyams, The New Statesman, p. 121.
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Statesman reported a circulation of 10,000 in 1925; by 1931, when Martin took over, C. H.
Rolph suggests a circulation of 14,000. A few years into Martin’s tenure, an advertisement in
February 1936 reported an average net weekly circulation of 20,833 copies for July-December
1935, and a similar notice the following year reported 24,221 copies for July-December 1936.21
This last figure, according to the magazine, was the largest circulation ever achieved by a
sixpenny weekly review.22 Martin writes that profits began to be made once the New Statesman
absorbed the Week-end Review in 1934.23 By the end of the decade, Rolph states that the
circulation had reached 30,000 copies.24
The relationship between Martin’s leadership and the paper’s literary half is not clear.
While Martin provided energy and stability, the paper lacked a prominent and long-term figure
on the literary side. Between 1931 and 1937, there were five literary editors; Ellis Roberts had
occupied this position for two years when Martin took over, but lasted only a few months before
he was fired. After this, the position was vacant for a short time, although G. W. Stonier was
the de facto literary editor while Harold Nicolson took over writing the principal ‘Books in
General’ column. David Garnett was appointed in 1932 but was unpopular, and left in 1934. It
was only at this point that the magazine found a more long-term editor in Raymond Mortimer,
who would stay at the New Statesman until 1946.25
Furthermore, the two sides of the paper do not seem to have shared a close working
relationship. Martin relates two telling anecdotes in his autobiography: first, when discussing
the lunches where key business was done, he adds, almost as an afterthought, that ‘One or two
of our literary staff usually joined us at lunch’.26 Second, he praises his first long-term literary
editor, Raymond Mortimer, as ‘the sort of literary editor with whom I scarcely ever wished to
21 See Appendix B.
22 ‘Our Net Sales’, The New Statesman and Nation, 16 January 1937, p. 84.
23 Martin also notes the surprise expressed by ex-Nation directors such as Keynes and Rowntree when, rather than
being forced to raise funds, they were presented with dividends on their investments. See Kingsley Martin, Editor: A
Second Volume of Autobiography, 1931-45 (London: Hutchinson, 1968), p. 14.
24 C. H. Rolph, Kingsley: The Life, Letters and Diaries of Kingsley Martin (London: Gollancz, 1973), p. 221.
25 Hyams, The New Statesman, pp. 160-69.
26 Martin, Editor, p. 7.
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interfere’.27 Martin’s ideal, one presumes, was a literary half that would run itself, allowing him
to get on with the business of political journalism. Heretofore, I have discussed relationships
between periodicals and strong institutional identities, whether these were possessed (Spectator),
desired (Time and Tide, Nation and Athenaeum) or rebelled against (Listener). The impression one
gets from the New Statesman in the early 1930s is far more haphazard, and this seems to have
permitted an engagement with modernism less concerned with working out a ‘newstatesmanly’
position and more with wider cultural rumination.28
As I have already proposed, the key question around modernism for the New Statesman in
the 1930s was one of canonicity. This is a notably different perspective from that taken by
critics now, and it is perhaps fair to argue that much recent work on modernism in the 1930s
has found it useful to introduce the distinctive concept of late modernism. Having said this, the
concept is itself not stable; both the location of a period of late modernism and the nature of its
literature are contested.29 Far more than modernism itself, the term is a critical imposition, first
used by critics such as Alan Wilde to discuss a transitional period in between modernism and
postmodernism that contained elements of both.30 More recent work has begun to argue that
late modernism is not just a pause between movements but a literary mode with its own
distinctive characteristics. Tyrus Miller’s Late Modernism (1999) has been particularly influential,
arguing for the existence of a transnational late modernist avant-garde. He reads Barnes, Loy,
late Lewis and early Beckett as part of a movement that rejected the utopian promise of
modernism yet found, in that rejection, artistic energy. These artists created works
characterized by, among other features, a deauthenticated world, disembodied laughter, and
grotesque bodies.31
27 Martin, Editor, p. 7.
28 Hyams, The New Statesman, p. 53.
29 For a fuller history of this term, see Modernism, ed. by Michael H. Whitworth (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), pp. 272-
96.
30 Alan Wilde, ‘Surfacings: Reflections on the Epistemology of Late Modernism’, boundary 2, 8 (1980), 209-27.
31 Tyrus Miller, Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts Between the World Wars (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1999), pp. 62-64.
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Since Miller, the term late modernism has spread far beyond this quite specific remit:
Fredric Jameson traces different uses of the word ‘modernity’ across the first half of the
twentieth century, concluding by reading late modernism as a largely postwar category
contingent upon ‘the emergence of some full-blown ideology of modernism’.32 Marina Mackay
argues that (unlike modernism and the Great War) late modernism aligns itself with a renovated
public sphere in the Second World War.33 Jed Esty emphasizes not the emergence of new
writers, but the changing role of older writers: late modernism signifies the reclamation by
literature of a national identity as Britain moved towards becoming a post-imperial state.34
Perhaps most divergent of all, Anthony Mellors dismisses Miller’s twenties and thirties
periodization and argues that under that model, modernism was ‘dissolving almost before it had
begun’: for him, late modernism is the long poetry of Williams, Zukofsky, Olson, Bunting,
Prynne, and Celan, texts not completed—in some cases—until well into the latter half of the
twentieth century.35
These different arguments are in some cases contradictory, and it may be easiest to
understand late modernism as plural, like modernism itself; I am not convinced that in order to
accept, say, Mellors’s discussion of poetry it is necessary to dismiss Miller’s thirties avant-garde.
For the purposes of this argument, though, I am less concerned with the characteristics of late
modernist art—however they might be constructed—than I am with the implications that
models of late modernism have for the public reception of modernism. A theme that runs
consistently through these different critical theories is the possibility of simultaneous
canonization and further creation; from Miller’s evocative image of his avant-garde writers
crafting ‘disfigured likenesses of modernist masterpieces: the unlovely allegories of a world’s
end’, to Fredric Jameson’s argument that late modernism requires ‘the emergence of some full-
32 Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London: Verso, 2002), p. 200.
33 Marina Mackay, Modernism and World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
34 Jed Esty, A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
35 Anthony Mellors, Late Modernist Poetics from Pound to Prynne (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), p. 3.
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blown ideology of modernism’.36 Marina Mackay is clearest of all, identifying late modernism
as
[a] historical moment in which modernism was simultaneously a way of writing (a formal and often
a political challenge) and a way of reading (already an institution, a canon).37
Across these very different critical arguments, then, late modernist art seems to require that
modernism be understood as canonical. In this context, the weekly review does not, of course,
identify late modernism but instead interrogates the cultural background of a canonical
modernism that these critical arguments depend upon. If, in the 1930s, modernism came to be
viewed as canonical, how did such a transition occur? How do these evaluative magazines
begin to treat modernist writers and modernist texts, the very concept of modernism itself,
differently? In many ways, and at many moments, weekly reviews—invested defenders of
official culture—behave in such a way that modernism’s public emergence appears complete.
And yet the question of late modernism has further ramifications. As MacKay recognizes, this
historical moment was one where modernism was open for both reading and writing: new art
could be crafted even as canonicity seemed assured. In other words—and just as one sees in
Hawkins—that canonical status was not stable.
Of course, the question of canonical status is itself complex, and by speaking of
modernism in this way I run the risk of representing a canonical modernism as somehow
inevitable and right. Indeed, the very idea of a literary canon now often proves controversial.
Ankhi Mukherjee relates a vituperative debate between Rita Dove and Helen Vendler over
Dove’s Penguin Anthology of Twentieth Century Poetry: in the pages of the New York Review of Books,
Vendler accused Dove of collecting together inferior poets; Dove replied by directly accusing
Vendler of racism.38 As Murkherjee puts it, this ‘canon war’ is ‘unpleasant and disturbing’.39
Yet it is often so, of course, for very good reasons.
36 Miller, Late Modernism, p. 14; Jameson, A Singular Modernity, p. 200.
37 Mackay, Modernism and World War II, p. 20.
38 Ankhi Mukherjee, What is a Classic?: Postcolonial Rewriting and Invention of the Canon (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2014), pp. 10-12.
39 Mukherjee, What is a Classic?, p. 12.
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This is not an argument for establishing a canon of authoritative aesthetic value:
strikingly, even works that do argue for such a thing acknowledge that they are out of date.
Witness Harold Bloom’s note, opening The Western Canon (1994), that one studies a canon of
twenty-six writers with ‘a certain nostalgia’. He goes on to reminisce, and bemoan the current
state of affairs: ‘Things have however fallen apart, the centre has not held, and mere anarchy is
in the process of being unleashed upon what used to be called “the learned world”.’40 This
suggests—with that slightly highfalutin reference to Yeats—that things were not always this way.
While references to an older and better world are par for the course in these expressions of
cultural conservatism, in this case there is I think some truth to his argument that things used to
be very different. Frank Kermode makes a similar argument more clearly, with less of Bloom’s
nostalgia.
There was a time when discussion of canons was angry but simple in the manner of Dr Leavis:
should Milton be disadvantaged or Shelley saved from demotion to the apocrypha. […] Under the
older dispensation, one might choose between several critical methodologies which had in
common only the assumptions that it was permissible to speak of literary quality and that one
could read with a degree of attention that warranted the issuing of judgments, even of declarations,
that some works demanded to be read by all who claimed the right to expound and instruct.41
The New Statesman’s discussions of modernism were in no ways simplistic, but the magazine did
perceive the achievement of some form of canonical status as broadly desirable. Having said
this, it is also notable that the magazine did not use the terms ‘canon’ or ‘canonical’, as they
were not yet in common parlance. The OED notes the first appearance of the term in relation
to literature in 1929.42 Thus while the New Statesman wrestled with the question of admitting
modernist writers to what would more usually have been called the ‘tradition’, the very words
used to describe that tradition were also in flux. A close exploration of exactly how and why
‘tradition’ became ‘canon’ is beyond the scope of this thesis. However, it might tentatively be
argued that modernism’s place in the tradition should be linked with an alteration in how the
40 Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (London: Macmillan, 1995), p. 1.
41 Frank Kermode, Pleasure and Change: the Aesthetics of Canon, ed. by Robert Alter (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2004), pp. 15-18.
42 OED, ‘canon, n.1’, Draft Additions, sense a.
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tradition was named: yet further evidence that modernism’s public emergence was complex
and momentous.
This chapter will explore the question of canonicity in two principal ways. First, it will
consider how modernism was treated as canonical, and the consequences of this for the weekly
review, in two examples: a series of laudatory reviews of Virginia Woolf, and a pastiche of T. S.
Eliot’s The Waste Land by Robert Bartlett, produced for a competition. Second, it will explore
the idea that this new canonical status was always troubled, in two final examples: first, the
relationship between negative, metacultural assessments of modern novels and the deeply
positive reviews given to the poetry of the Auden group, in the context of a pervasive interwar
awareness that civilisation might be entering a late stage. This chapter closes by discussing the
extraordinary—and problematic—publication of a short work by James Joyce, ‘From a Banned
Writer to a Banned Singer’, in the New Statesman in 1932.
Finally, it should be noted that this argument represents an explicit attempt to
destabilize the potential for a neat ending to this thesis. Ian Hacking’s suggestion that
classifications and classes might emerge ‘hand in hand’ has dominated my understanding of
modernism’s emergence into public life. Hawkins’s discussion of T. S. Eliot and the ‘terrible
moderns’ seems to signal a moment of clear emergence; while the term ‘modernism’ was not in
common parlance, that which it described was widely understood and accepted. To rephrase
Hacking, this is modernism and its critics ‘each egging the other on’, emerging into the light.
But the uncertainty in Hawkins—and, as I shall argue, in a number of New Statesman texts—
suggests that no clear moment of emergence exists, and that modernism’s place in the canon
remained, at least for the weekly review, perpetually uncertain.
*
This being said, modernism was often discussed as canonical, and this is a matter of no
little significance. Reviews of Virginia Woolf’s work run throughout this thesis, from Sylvia
Lynd’s qualified praise for Jacob’s Room and her rejection of Mrs Dalloway in Time and Tide, to
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Rachel Annand Taylor’s unusually lush admiration of To The Lighthouse and the patronizing
review of A Room Of One’s Own in the Spectator. In this context, the unqualified praise given to
Woolf’s novels in the New Statesman is significant as a sign of the times: the modernist novel is
publicly embraced as great and canonical. This is true even of some of Woolf’s least accessible
work; Gerald Bullett reviews The Waves in October 1931, proposing that ‘what Mrs Woolf does
[…] is little short of miraculous’. He goes on to address the modernist technique of the novel,
and justify its difficulty.
Because it is her constant endeavour to record the psychological minutiae of experience, to snare
in words an incommunicable secret, and to show the bubble of consciousness shining, expanding,
reflecting—in its depths and on its surface—the changing colours of the universe around it, Mrs
Woolf’s writing has always been ‘difficult’: by which I mean that it will yield its motive, its clear
and luminous core, only to a reader who is ready to empty himself of preconceptions and to
become in the highest degree receptive, patient, searching.43
The novel’s difficulty is framed in terms of aspiration and necessity: it may be complex, but the
result of reading the novel (if one is ‘ready’) is to understand its valuable ‘clear and luminous
core’. Moreover, the difficulties are a necessary manifestation of the complexity of the task that
Woolf sets herself (‘to record the psychological minutiae of experience’), betraying an unspoken
assumption that the modernist novel reflects an unquestionable reaction to the complicated
reality of modernity.
Compared, especially, to Lynd’s reviews in Time and Tide, Bullett’s argument represents
a form of critical maturity. Lynd questions the legitimacy of Woolf’s ‘method’, but for Bullett
modernism has emerged to the point where a review of Woolf’s new novel can directly analyse
the novel’s depiction of consciousness. Moreover, the metaphor used for this discussion (a
‘bubble of consciousness shining, expanding, reflecting […] the changing colours of the
universe’) has crucial antecedents in Woolf’s own fiction. ‘Bubble’ is important to Bernard
throughout The Waves; following Neville’s suggestion that he should ‘burble on’, Bernard
returns time and again to the concept of images appearing in his mind as bubbles: ‘Up they
43 Gerald Bullett, ‘Virginia Woolf Soliloquises’, The New Statesman and Nation, 10 October 1931, Autumn Books
Supplement, p. x.
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bubble—images.’44 Later, ‘The bubbles are rising like the silver bubbles from the floor of a
saucepan: image on top of image.’ 45 Bullett’s image in its entirety—a ‘bubble of
consciousness’—might also be traced further back: to Woolf’s ‘semi-transparent envelope
surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end’ in ‘Modern Fiction’, and to
Mary Datchet’s description in Night and Day of ‘arrows of sensation striking strangely through
the envelope of personality which shelters us so conveniently from our fellows’.46 Bullett’s
critical appreciation of The Waves is thus not only positive and receptive to its innovations, but
deeply influenced by Woolf’s own thinking.
Though something similar to this has been seen before—in the Nation and Athenaeum,
Vita Sackville-West’s allusions to The Waste Land while reviewing Ernst Toller—the two texts
are very different. The presence of Eliot behind Sackville-West’s review seems to function for
those who recognize the allusion: a wry wink at the initiated. I read Bullett’s review as a
fundamentally more open approach to analysing Woolf’s representation of consciousness,
engaging directly with her own language in order to study her work.
To pursue this distinction further, consider E. B. C. Jones, writing not on Woolf in
particular but on the modern novel in 1933.
In the last decade it [the novel form] has been stretched even looser to accommodate Ulysses, Mrs
Dalloway and the ten volumes of Miss Dorothy Richardson’s single and still unfinished work of art
[Pilgrimage]. Our conception of the ways in which character can be presented has been enlarged;
and sometimes we have had to relinquish our desire for character altogether—to lose that in order
to gain something else: a sense of the passage of time; of the powerful realm of the unconscious; of
conflicts that go deeper than personality; of the part of man, underlying character, which is in
some obscure relation to the universe. In such books, to ask for a coherent John and Mary you
would recognize in the Tube would be irrelevant. But when a novel fails to impose its own
alternative to character-interest, then John and Mary will be missed.47
Jones’s focus is clear: she aims to explore the experience of reading the contemporary novel,
and how readers’ expectations have shifted in recent decades. Jones argues that modernism has
44 Virginia Woolf, The Waves, ed. by Gillian Beer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 28-29.
45 Woolf, The Waves, p. 39. Further examples: ‘More and more bubbles into my mind as I talk, images and images’
and ‘as I move, surrounded, included and taking part, the usual phrases begin to bubble up, and I wish to free
these bubbles from the trapdoor in my head’. Woolf, The Waves, pp. 68, 157.
46 The Essays of Virginia Woolf, ed. by Andrew McNeillie and Stuart N. Clarke, 6 vols (London: Hogarth Press, 1986-
2011), IV, 160; Virginia Woolf, Night and Day, ed. by Julia Briggs (London: Penguin, 1992), p. 228.
47 E. B. C. Jones, ‘New Novels’, The New Statesman and Nation, 28 October 1933, p. 518.
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transformed the novel while still recognizing that such changes are recent: she uses the present
perfect (‘has been stretched’) throughout and suggests that the ghost of ‘our desire for character’
is still present, to a certain extent. However, in a way that seems almost to acknowledge the
tenacity of this desire, Jones deploys a series of first person plural pronouns in order to orient
the reader and her review toward an earnest attempt to explore the nature of the modernist
novel. The insights that this offers may not be particularly surprising—a focus on time,
interiority and the unconscious—but the tone in which they are offered is significant. Jones’s
description of these different aspects of the modernist novel is tentative and vague: we gain
‘something’, a ‘sense’, of how man is in ‘some kind of obscure relation to the universe’. This
represents not so much a denial of the validity of modernist form—there is no sense of a
challenge offered to Ulysses, for example—but an acknowledgement of a still partial
understanding of modernist form and an open-minded desire to learn.
Once again, like Bullett’s review of The Waves one can trace Woolf inside the argument
of Jones’s essay. The quotation above refers to ‘a coherent John and Mary you would recognize
on the Tube’, which might plausibly be understood as an allusion to a famous image from the
start of Virginia Woolf’s essay ‘Character in Fiction’.48
One night some weeks ago, then, I was late for the train and jumped into the first carriage I came
to. As I sat down I had the strange and uncomfortable feeling that I was interrupting a
conversation between two people who were already sitting there. Not that they were young or
happy. Far from it. They were both elderly, the woman over sixty, the man well over forty. […]
The elderly lady, however, whom I will call Mrs Brown […] Mr Smith (as I will call him).49
Woolf imagines witnessing a conversation, and goes on to explore how fiction must attempt to
live up to the conversation between Mrs Brown and Mr Smith on a train. Jones’s two figures
are almost identical: John (Smith?) and Mary (Brown?), on a train.
Of course, in some ways Jones’s argument seems to work against Woolf: where Woolf
insists that the novel must endeavour to capture Brown and Smith, Jones warns the reader not
to expect ‘John and Mary […] in the Tube’. Then again, perhaps the emphasis should be
48 The complex history of this essay is discussed at length in Chapter 2.
49 Essays of Virginia Woolf, III, 423.
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placed on Jones’s use of ‘coherent’: in order to truly capture Smith and Brown (as Woolf
desires), one must dismiss coherence (as Jones warns) and instead focus on Woolf’s request that
we ‘not expect just at present a complete and satisfactory presentment of her [Mrs Brown]’.
One must ‘tolerate the spasmodic, the obscure, the fragmentary, the failure’, because we might
be ‘trembling on the verge of one of the great ages of English literature’.50
Jones and Bullett do not use the term ‘modernist’. But they do engage directly and
intimately with modernist thought, acknowledging difficulty and hoping to explore, via the
medium of the weekly review, complex ideas. Compared to worried concerns over the
legitimacy of modernism, this surely represents a higher level of analysis, and a key precursor
for this analysis is the issue of modernism’s canonicity. Bullett and Jones have some tolerance
for readerly scepticism (Jones’s seeming nostalgia for a ‘coherent John and Mary’ might be
understood in this way), but by and large they operate with the knowledge that their audience
will easily accept that Woolf’s work is great, and canonical: in several important ways,
modernism has emerged into public life.
The image of Woolf as a canonical writer is addressed more directly in David Garnett’s
review of The Years. Leonard Woolf famously kept his criticisms of The Years to himself, as he was
concerned for the state of Virginia’s mental health.51 David Garnett was not faced with the
same problem: for him, it is perfectly clear that he is reading the latest and greatest masterwork
from an artist operating at the height of her powers.
She [Woolf] is a supreme imaginative artist, of extraordinary originality and, in my opinion, The
Years is the finest novel she has written. It is altogether on a bigger scale than Jacob’s Room, and has
a fullness and richness in conception and execution which were lacking in To The Lighthouse. There
is an awareness of old age, and of sympathy with it, in the last part of the book which is new.52
It is an almost fawning review, and while log-rolling is not quite the correct accusation,
Garnett’s social acquaintance with Woolf should not be dismissed entirely: he and Julian Bell
had visited the Woolfs on Sunday 15 March for tea and a long conversation, a week before the
50 Essays of Virginia Woolf, III, 436.
51 As he put it, ‘To Virginia I praised the book more than I should have done if she had been well’. Leonard Woolf,
Downhill All The Way: An Autobiography of the Years 1919-1939 (London: Hogarth Press, 1967), p. 155.
52 David Garnett, ‘Books in General’, The New Statesman and Nation, 20 March 1937, p. 481.
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review was published.53 The praise has force and weight: for Garnett, Woolf is not just
canonical but one of the greats, ‘supreme’ and ‘extraordinary’.
Indeed, perhaps the crucial element in this review is its emphasis on biography
alongside literary criticism. Garnett writes Woolf into a carefully constructed narrative of her
own artistic career, where The Years is both a high point, and a rich and mature culmination of
Woolf’s modernism. It has that ‘bigger scale’ than Jacob’s Room, a ‘fullness and richness’ absent
from To The Lighthouse; Orlando and Flush are dismissed as ‘wild disjointed poetry’. The very
serenity of this progress towards the majestic greatness of The Years is slightly unnerving. Note
Garnett’s use of descriptive nouns (‘fullness and richness’) redolent with a sense of maturity and
old age, and his explicit argument that one of the key innovations in The Years is ‘an awareness
of old age, and a sympathy with it’. Modern readers are aware that The Years was Woolf’s
penultimate novel, but Garnett, of course, was not; yet this review still seems to understand The
Years as the product of Woolf’s late career. Furthermore, Garnett constructs a biographical arc
that makes new sense of old work in the awareness of this new one.
As literary criticism, this is highly problematic. Gordon McMullan has written
illuminatingly on the problems of reading three of Shakespeare’s later plays—Coriolanus, The
Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest—as the late plays. McMullan explores how this intensely
biographical critical mode sets up boundaries on interpretation.
The idea of ‘late Shakespeare’, in other words, contributed to the establishment of what I will call a
discourse of lateness—that is, a construct, ideological, rhetorical and heuristic, a function not of life or
of art but of the practice of reading or appreciating certain texts within a set of predetermined
parameters.54
Garnett’s review seems to operate along similar lines: his admiration for The Years is clear, but
develops into a construction of Woolf’s career as leading up to that novel. Critically troubling
though this may be, it is revealing as a depiction of a modernist novelist. As far as this model of
53 The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. by Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie, 5 vols (London: Hogarth Press, 1977-
1984), V, 68-69 (15 March 1937).
54 Gordon McMullan, Shakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing: Authorship in the Proximity of Death (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 5.
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a serene late style goes, Shakespeare may be the archetype, but Woolf is similarly read by this
review as an unquestionably great novelist, producing canonical literature.
Unlike Hawkins’s review of Eliot that opens this chapter, these reviews identify
modernism as canonical and do not worry about that canonization. Where Hawkins seems to
worry about the potential consequences of canonizing something that was ‘previously
terrible’—and so recently—Garnett rewrites Woolf’s career as building up to her late, 1930s
greatness. Rather than always referring back to modernism’s former presence as ‘terrible’,
Garnett’s biographical criticism seeks to efface any traces of the avant-garde from the
supremely powerful figure of The Years-era Virginia Woolf. This, too, might be regarded as
troubling, and raises the question of how exactly modernism might be regarded as securely
canonical. To explore this further, I turn to a very different type of text.
*
When the New Statesman absorbed the Week-end Review in 1934, it continued that
periodical’s tradition of printing a competition at the end of each issue. These rapidly became a
New Statesman institution.55 The usual format was for a staff member or regular contributor to
propose a humorous brief and request creative responses. The best answers would be collected,
discussed, published, and small prizes would be awarded. Cultural (especially literary) subjects
were dominant. In May 1937 a fascinating competition provoked answers that addressed
modernism. The brief asks for
the best advertisement concerning gin, halitosis, rejuvenation, night starvation, soap, book of the
month clubs, beauty preparations, adverts, milk, mowing machines, wireless sets, chocolates,
undertakers, bookies, missionary societies, stays, umbrellas, magazines, or encyclopaedias, in the
style of D. H. Lawrence, Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Hemingway, Huxley, Miss Compton-Burnett,
Gertrude Stein, Ronald Firbank, T. S. Eliot, Spender, Barrie, A. E. Housman, Dr Johnson or Sir
Thomas Browne. Any product may be mated with any author, and the advertisements should be
not longer than 300 words in prose or 25 lines in verse.56
55 The competitions continue to this day, and selections have been published over the years; the first of these was
edited by G. W. Stonier. See New Statesman Competitions, ed. by G. W. Stonier (London: Faber and Faber, 1946).
56 G. W. Stonier, ‘Week-end Competitions No. 375’, The New Statesman and Nation, 22 May 1937, pp. 860-62.
Stonier’s articles and reviews will be quoted throughout this chapter; C. H. Rolph described him as ‘that quiet,
elusive and enchantingly inventive writer […] whose work seemed to some of us like a specially lucid kind of
modern verse pushed into conventionally-shaped New Statesman paragraphs’. He was not especially influential on
paper, but his association with the paper was long and deep. In the twenties, there were apparently publication
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A group of largely modernist writers—Housman, Barrie, Browne, and Johnson are the oddly
chosen exceptions—are brought together with a group of commercial products, and
advertisements are requested. It speaks volumes about the cultural position of these writers that
they are acceptable fodder for such an exercise; one wonders, though, what precisely is
expected from this competition. It is immediately noticeable that adverts for these things would
not be found in the New Statesman, and that the list describes better a cheaper weekly with a far
greater circulation, a twopenny magazine such as John Bull. When the New Statesman printed this
competition, the issue of John Bull for the same week advertised hair lotion on the front page,
pain relief medication (p. 2), binoculars (p. 3), a double page spread for cutlery (pp. 4-5),
furniture via credit agreement (p. 12), shaving soap (p. 8), and railway holidays (p. 22), to take
just a few examples out of dozens.57
Crucially, not only subject but volume differs: a magazine like John Bull would carry far
more advertisements than the New Statesman. While too much significance could be placed on
the odd inclusion of ‘adverts’ in the list of products to be advertised, it is perhaps further
indication that what is evoked here is not the items themselves but the cultural position
associated with such items and adverts for them: a more popular, commercial periodical culture
that this magazine is expressly not a part of.
The perspective of this prompt is thus deeply hierarchical, and not a little
condescending: it takes a group of writers—more than this, a certain group of writers that are
knowingly placed together, exceptions aside—and requests that their ‘style’ (Stonier’s term) be
performed in a way that is imagined as below the writers in terms of content (they write novels
or poems, not adverts) and below the magazine in terms of form (the New Statesman does not
print adverts of this type, but a cheaper magazine might). It is a form of carnivalesque play that
is always clearly safely delineated, and is thus harmless. As such, the competition is an activity
days when the editor (Clifford Sharp) was drunk and the literary editor (Desmond MacCarthy) was out for a too-
lengthy lunch; in these situations, Stonier ‘was de facto editor, and put many an issue to bed unaided.’ See Rolph,
Kingsley, pp. 220-21.
57 See John Bull, 22 May 1937.
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that reinforces the New Statesman’s position in the periodical sphere: it is at once not the proper
location for these adverts, but is able to mock and play with those magazines that would house
these texts.
Two weeks later, the results were printed. Stonier provides a short precis of the various
responses he received, praising a ‘fair Hemingway’ but a series of poor ‘Joyces, Lawrences and
Barries’. 58 One entry on Stein was praised for the line ‘The fleet is the fleet is all lit up’, a (very
contemporary) reference to Tommy Woodroffe’s notorious inebriated broadcast of the fleet
review of 20 May 1937, and Stein’s famous line ‘Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose’.59 The prize
was shared equally between three entries: ‘Compton and Burnett, Undertakers’, by ‘Eremita’
(pseudonyms were commonplace); ‘Sir T. B. of the Product AMBROSIA, which sweeteneth a
Foul Breath’, by ‘S.E.R.A’, and Robert Bartlett’s extraordinary take on T. S. Eliot.60
The New Statesman’s competition, then, generates a series of parodies of modernism;
while the readers are not given access to the ‘fair Hemingway’ or poor work on Joyce and
Lawrence, entries on Stein and Eliot are reproduced, the former only as a fragment. Exploring
these parodies is complex: any attempt to parody modernism is faced with the importance of
parody to modernism. As Sarah Davison has it, ‘high modernist practice is distinguished by the
way it draws on and utilizes the creative, self-reflexive potentialities of the [parodic] mode’.61 At
the same time, it should be noted that texts that mocked the distinctive novelties of modernist
texts—especially the poetry—were present from the very earliest days of modernism itself, as
Leonard Diepeveen has recently demonstrated.62 Indeed, the fragment of a parody of Stein
might be understood in just this tradition: it combines Stein and Woodrooffe to transform
Stein’s argument about aesthetics into a drunken ramble. There is no indication of what this
58 G. W. Stonier, ‘Results of Competition 375’, The New Statesman and Nation, 5 June 1937, pp. 938-40 (p. 940).
59 See Gertrude Stein, Geography and Plays (Madison: University of Wisonsin Press, 1993), p. 187. This is merely one
early instance of the phrase, which recurs throughout Stein’s work.
60 Stonier, ‘Results of Competition 375’, p. 940.
61 Sarah Davison, ‘Parody and Modernism: The Practice of Parody and Pastiche in Early Twentieth-century
Literature’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Oxford, 2009), p. 15.
62 See Leonard Diepeveen, Mock Modernism: An Anthology of Parodies, Travesties, Frauds, 1910-1935 (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 2014).
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might have been advertising, but the point is that Stein’s distinctive syntactical structure is
aped—and very closely—in such a way that makes the reference clear while simultaneously
mocking Stein’s pretensions to poetry: that which she thinks is poetry is here revealed as merely
inebriation. Put bluntly, one does not have to engage with the aesthetic challenge of Stein’s rose
in order to get the joke.
In an earlier work on modernist difficulty, Diepeveen discusses J. C. Squire’s famous
1924 short story, ‘The Man Who Wrote Free Verse’.63 Here, poet Reggie Twyford reinvents
himself as a writer of free verse in order to demonstrate that such modernist poetry is
meaningless and easily mimicked.64 The parody of Stein reveals essentially the same perspective,
and one might conclude from this that modernism exists in parodies only to be dismissed as
nonsense: these competitions, then, might seem to work against the more open-minded
engagement with modernism that one locates in the reviews. If modernism has emerged, it has
emerged in certain parts of the magazine only.
However, this argument is stymied by Robert Bartlett’s extraordinary take on T. S.
Eliot, which the magazine prints in full, and is reproduced below.
‘An Advertisement for Polythymol Toothpaste in the Manner of T. S. Eliot’
Lovely but lonely
La Belle Helène, famous Beauty Queen
Acclaimed the Toast of Surbiton
With a wicked pair of hips. Notwithstanding
‘A year ago to-day he brought me Buttercups’
Could never bring it off
Exhaling sighs as gentle as a breeze on softly flowing Thames
Blown upwards from a Chelsea Embankment sewer
Butter No Butter Butta Butta Cups
You ought to do something about it, I said
Nellie ain’t no blooming rose he said to me
O did he, she said, and socked me one
SORRY YOU’VE BEEN TROUBLED
Polythymol deriding Halitosis
63 J. C. Squire, ‘The Grub Street Nights: VII—The Man Who Wrote Free Verse’, The London Mercury, June 1924,
pp. 127-37.
64 Twyford plans to reveal his deception, but never does as his poetry is so successful; following a communist
revolution, he is anointed ‘Poet Laureate of the Revolution’. See Leonard Diepeveen, The Difficulties of Modernism
(New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 2-9.
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Forgot the wailing saxophone and the swaying backsides
and the Dividend Account
Restoring Ernie to the arms of Helen
Herr Doktor Klaus the German Dentist
White coated with a pocket full of golf balls
Guessed my handicap first time
Remains lie rotting in impenetrable caves
Picked over by the tooth-pick only week to week
Il est cocu le Chef de Gare
Clean your teeth with Polythymol Clean your teeth
Clean65
I contend that this text is still a parody, but one of a very different nature.
Borrowing terms from Gérard Genette’s influential work on parodies, Bartlett’s work is
a hypertext: it gains meaning from an earlier hypotext, Eliot’s The Waste Land (just as ‘The fleet
is the fleet is all lit up’ gains meaning from Stein’s rose).66 Genette goes on to provide a series of
distinctions between different forms of hypertexts, but the principal one that concerns me is the
very first one made between transformative and imitative texts.
Imitation, too, is no doubt a transformation, but one that involves a more complex process: it
requires, to put it in roughshod manner, a previously constituted model of generic competence (let
us call it an epic model) drawn from that singular performance that is known as the Odyssey (and
perhaps a few others), one that is capable of generating an indefinite number of mimetic
performances. This model, then, introduces between the imitated text and the imitative one a
supplementary stage and a mediation that are not to be found in the simple or direct type of
transformation. In order to transform a text, a simple and mechanical gesture might suffice (an
extreme example would consist in tearing off a few pages—a case of reductive transformation). But
in order to imitate a text, it is inevitably necessary to acquire at least a partial mastery of it, a
mastery of that specific quality which one has chosen to imitate.67
The parody of Stein is reductive and, in Genette’s terms, transformative. But I suggest that
Bartlett’s text is more complex, imitative, implying a ‘partial mastery’ of The Waste Land. The
significance of this is, I hope, clear: this manner of parody is not simply mocking modernism,
and portraying it as nonsense, but engaging intimately with the modernist text in order to
parody it. In turn, this ascribes a form of canonicity to The Waste Land similar to that proposed
by the reviews. It is not just there to be mocked, but to be engaged with, even if that
engagement is humorous in nature.
65 Robert Bartlett, ‘An Advertisement for Polythymol Toothpaste in the Manner of T. S. Eliot’, The New Statesman
and Nation, 5 June 1937, p. 940.
66 Gérard Genette, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, trans. by Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), p. 4.
67 Genette, Palimpsests, p. 6.
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Consider, for example, the second stanza. Bartlett stages a fragment of conversation
between two figures, an unidentified narrator and Helen/Nellie/Helène, the focus of the poem.
This is a compressed reworking of the pub scene in ‘A Game of Chess’, where the two
characters gossip about criticisms of Helen, who then punches the narrator. Helen’s shout to
accompany the outburst of violence—‘SORRY YOU’VE BEEN TROUBLED’—mimics that of the
disembodied barman in Eliot’s poem, ‘HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME’. 68 But this differs
profoundly from the reductive reworking of Stein’s rose: this text engages directly with the
conversation between two women in Eliot’s poem.
He’s been in the army four years, he wants a good time,
And if you don’t give it him, there’s others will, I said.
Oh is there, she said. Something o’that, I said.
Then I’ll know who to thank, she said, and give me a straight look.
(ll. 148-51)
Significantly, one of the issues in this dispute is Lil’s teeth: ‘poor Albert’ (l. 147) had given her
money for ‘a nice set’ (l. 145) because as it stands, ‘I can’t bear to look at you’ (l. 146). Similarly,
as Ernie says to the poem’s speaker, ‘Nellie ain’t no blooming rose’.
Rather than simply copying the structure of urban conversation and capitalised
interjection, Bartlett imitates and restages a moment of Eliot’s poem; though here, unlike the
original, the threat of violence (‘a straight look’) between speaker and Lil explodes into actuality.
Helen is far more dynamic than her original, and achieves the resolution she strives for: she
attacks the person she sees as a threat, cures her bad breath (thanks, of course, to Polythymol
toothpaste), and gains Ernie. Lil’s lack of good looks is attributed to ‘them pills I took, to bring it
off’ (l. 159), and she achieves no resolution as the pub, and section, closes. But Bartlett’s
reworking is an advertisement, and thus the key pharmaceutical is not dangerous and scarring
but effective, and miraculously so. Eliot’s image of a woman forced into an illegal and
damaging abortion is refigured into a necessarily happier narrative of a woman whose troubles
with her man are cured by toothpaste. Morally speaking, the change is quite horrifying, but it
68 See The Waste Land, l. 141, in The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1969), pp. 59-
80. Further references to this poem are given by line number after quotation in the text.
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remains (in Genette’s terms) a masterly imitation of some of the finer details of Eliot’s poem,
while directing the rewrite towards the narrative required for advertisements.
One could turn to further examples of Bartlett’s skilful imitation: for example, of Eliot’s
characteristic tonal shifts between the portentously lyrical and the everyday; ‘Lovely but lonely
| La Belle Heléne’ followed shortly by ‘the Toast of Surbiton | With a wicked pair of hips’
recalls, I think, the fortune-telling lines in ‘The Burial of the Dead’:
Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
Had a bad cold, nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,
With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)
(ll. 43-48)
My point here is not to present Bartlett’s poem as an undiscovered modernist masterpiece: it is
not. It is, however, an imitation of some quality, one that reads The Waste Land as it creates its
own version. Moreover, one could tentatively suggest that this act of rewriting draws attention
to the recurring importance of suburban conversation in The Waste Land, a side of Eliot’s poetry
that is not now revolutionary in critical terms, but was rarely discussed in 1937.69
Indeed, I would argue that Bartlett’s parody of Eliot represents some of the clearest
evidence for modernism’s emergence into public form. Here, The Waste Land is essentially
treated as canonical public property, available not just for mockery but for creative engagement
and humorous parodic play that in no way snickers at the poetic value of Eliot’s work. It is these
competitions—mundane, everyday engagements with literary culture—that, in the New
Statesman at least, most firmly place modernism in the literary canon.
*
Canonicity may be stable in Robert Bartlett’s parody, but as I have already argued it
was not throughout the magazine, and I turn now to explore more closely how that canonicity
becomes problematic. Janet Adam Smith’s editorial work on the Listener, discussed in Chapter 4,
69 For example, David Chinitz’s work has been enormously influential in recent years, directing attention to Eliot’s
interest in certain aspects of popular culture; see T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2003).
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would imply that the key literary event of this period was the emergence of a new group of
poets centred around W. H. Auden.70 Indeed, in the New Statesman, reviews of Auden
generation poets—especially, though not uniquely, those written by G. W. Stonier—often seem
to propose a seamless development whereby Eliot has become canonical and, in turn, has
inspired a new generation; a logical counterpart, one might suggest, to Hawkins’s discussion of
Eliot.
Mr Stephen Spender is one of a group of young poets whose work attracted attention in the pages
of New Signatures […] He is more closely associated with Mr. Auden and Mr. Day Lewis, whose
work is better known. Together, they form the wedge of a new forward movement in English
poetry, of which Eliot is the master and Lawrence the hero.71
Stonier, too, makes gestures towards the canonisation of T. S. Eliot (and adds D. H. Lawrence).
If that canonisation is tentative and unsure, as argued above, how confident can Stonier’s
proposal of new poetry building on the previous work of the old generation be? One might
argue that to see Spender, Auden and Day Lewis as inheritors of the Eliotic/Lawrentian mantle
is itself a form of reading that speaks to the canonical status of modernism, as they offer new
work that depends upon the reading of an (accepted) older generation of modernist writers.
However, such optimism in the presence of new British poetry must be tempered
against negativity: a common critical turn, especially in the journalistic situations that lend
themselves to broad-brush metacultural analysis. The New Statesman’s ‘New Novels’ column—
covering several novels per week in a single column—was an ideal location for this. Consider
Cyril Connolly in 1935.
My advice to anyone going on a holiday is to get detective stories. That is where some of our best
brains go. When I reviewed novels in the late twenties there was still an aesthetic interest in the
process. Gide, Forster, Huxley, Hemingway, Wyndham Lewis, Garnett, Thomas Mann, James
Joyce, Virginia Woolf—these wrote novels one could write a whole page about. At present
reviewing novels is like living in some decaying idior-rhythmic community in Crete or Mount
Athos.72
Hawkins’ binary assessment of Eliot’s career (then terrible, now de rigeur, even on Sundays) is
here refigured for the modern novel: then aesthetically interesting, now a ‘decaying idior-
70 Following the previous chapter, I borrow the term ‘Auden generation’ from Samuel Hynes.
71 G. W. Stonier, ‘A Poet of Iron’, The New Statesman and Nation, 4 February 1933, p. 136.
72 Cyril Connolly, ‘New Novels’, The New Statesman and Nation, 3 August 1935, pp. 166-67.
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rhythmic community’. Such an argument not only casts aspersions on new novelists (and, slyly,
on the continuing work of Joyce, Woolf, Lewis et al.) but attempts to inscribe modernism into
cultural authority. To borrow a phrase from Arno Mayer’s discussion of the ancien régime, this is
the modernist novel as one of the ‘chiens de garde of official culture.’73 Indeed, the lack of
emphasis on modernism’s now occluded identity as rebellious avant-garde might even suggest
that Connolly’s cynical view of contemporary novels is in fact a more successful attempt to
canonize modernist texts.
The construction of an unambiguous binary between modernist past and woeful present
was not uncommon. Raymond Mortimer—again writing the ‘New Novels’ column—wrote in
1933 of the ‘bracing aesthetic climate’ of the twenties, and again gives a list of examples. While
Connolly explicitly limits himself to novelists, Mortimer ranges from musicians to architects,
visual artists to actors: Picasso, Le Corbusier, Matisse, Maillol, Stravinski, Freud, Charlie
Chaplin, plus writers; Strachey, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, André Gide, Aldous Huxley.
Sadly, he laments, ‘the next generation has just failed to appear’.74 The philosopher C. E. M.
Joad wrote a more extended (and generalised) treatment of the same idea in the following year,
entitled ‘The End of an Epoch’. He meant ‘to suggest that somewhere around 1926 a cultural
epoch, having reached its culmination, began to decline, and that about the same time there
was born a new epoch, radically different in respect of its thought, its values and its habits’.75
Analysis of the key aspects of this generation was largely focused around the idea of
‘disintegration’:
The outstanding characteristic of the 1918 to 1926 period was analysis, analysis leading to the
disintegration of what was analysed. […] In the cultural sphere Bloomsbury reigned supreme. Its
standard dominated literature, criticism and art. The high lights were Lytton Strachey and
Virginia Woolf. […] Mrs Woolf presented her reader with a flux of scenes linked only by temporal
sequence and of experiences which only courtesy could assign to the same character. […] The
other writers who chiefly employed Bloomsbury’s blessings were Lawrence, Joyce, Proust,
especially Proust, and later Huxley—writers who analysed, disintegrated and rebelled.76
73 Arno J. Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War (London: Croom Helm, 1981), p. 210.
74 Raymond Mortimer, ‘New Novels’, The New Statesman and Nation, 22 April 1933, p. 507.
75 C. E. M. Joad, ‘The End of an Epoch—I’, The New Statesman and Nation, 1 December 1934, pp. 785-86 (p. 785).
76 Joad, ‘The End of an Epoch—I’, p. 785.
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While this praise is clearly double-edged at best, Joad went on in his second part to make it
clear that however disintegrative Woolf’s work was, the successors were far worse.
Mankind, it appears, is incorrigible. Sooner or later there will be another war. This, whomever
wins it, will see the end of our civilization. […] In literature the tone is set by such writers as
Hemingway, an intellectual who seems at times to delight in catering for half-wits, and, writing
deliberately in words of one syllable and sentences of half a dozen words, glorifies the passions of
the savage and fawns upon the possessors of brute courage and physical strength.77
The overall arc of the argument made by Connolly, Mortimer and Joad is recognisably as old
as the hills: dissatisfaction with the present, and a sense of nostalgia projected back on the
recent past to imagine a faded golden age (even if, for Joad’s disintegrative model, the gold was
always impure). But such a gesture of cynical metacultural analysis is also temporally and
geographically specific. Richard Overy has argued that the British interwar lived experience
was fundamentally morbid. A series of public debates that interrogated the state of the world
were redolent with the perception that Western civilization was on the wane, and some form of
apocalyptic crisis was close to hand.78
Under this model, then, the inscription of modernism into some form of official culture
is entirely contingent upon an awareness of impending crisis that was very real, if unwarranted:
as Overy notes, the UK was relatively insulated from economic chaos, social unrest and
political extremism.79 In other words, the condemnation of contemporary novels signifies not
only as critical argument but as cultural pose, the assumption of a morbid negativity about the
present and future that colours readings of the past.
Criticism that claims to locate authentic newness in poetry must therefore be considered
carefully: what does it mean to be new in a morbid age? It does not seem entirely sufficient to
conclude that the magazine thought that British poetry was in good shape while novels were
not: the cynical arguments made by Connolly, Mortimer and Joad are too broad, and tap into
a wider cultural malaise. Similarly, the identification of promise in the Auden generation was
not just a good review but a wide-ranging claim for optimism.
77 C. E. M. Joad, ‘The End of an Epoch—II’, The New Statesman and Nation, 8 December 1934, pp. 820-21 (p. 820).
78 Richard Overy, The Morbid Age: Britain and the Crisis of Civilisation, 1919-1939 (London: Allen Lane, 2009).
79 Overy, The Morbid Age, p. 7.
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We are always, of course, on the brink of a poetic revival—that is taken for granted. […]
Nevertheless, it is true to assert that English poetry to-day is in a far more interesting state than it
was five years ago; and this change has been due to the poets of New Signatures. […] And the
pleasure of finding, once more, a definite movement among English poets has been at least partially
responsible for its success; for we may be sure that many who have followed in its train have only
the vaguest idea of what it is all about, but are glad to know that there is something astir
somewhere. It has needed a concerted movement, and not merely a number of individual efforts,
to awaken even a minor general interest.80
G. W. Stonier (the critic here) wrote repeatedly to promote these poets as a group. Reviewing
Auden’s The Orators in 1932, he emphasized that ‘The reader will probably understand Mr
Auden better if he reads at the same time his contemporaries, Mr C. Day Lewis and Mr
Stephen Spender, who are akin to him’.81 In 1933 he wrote of Auden, Day Lewis and Spender
in a review quoted above, as forming ‘the wedge of a new forward movement in English
poetry’.82 The New Statesman employed these poets infrequently as reviewers, too. At the end of
1933, for instance, Stephen Spender published a critical review of T. S. Eliot’s The Use of Poetry
and the Use of Criticism.83 In addition, like the Listener the New Statesman did publish poetry—
typically one poem every two issues—and played a role in bringing Auden and his
contemporaries to a wider audience. Taking just the poets that Stonier acknowledged as a
group in 1932, between that year and 1937 the New Statesman published four poems by Auden,
six by Spender and three by Day Lewis.84
More interesting than this simple evidence of promotion, however, is the way in which
Stonier is able to assert a sense of positivity and construct a cultural background against which
this ‘definite movement’ is able to emerge. The analytic structure under which Stonier is able to
construct the Auden generation as the great hope of British poetry depends upon a two-fold
assertion: that ‘poetic revival[s]’ are cyclical (‘we are always on the brink’) and that such revivals
must necessarily take the form of ‘a concerted movement’. This is curious. While the
80 G. W. Stonier, ‘New Country Revisited’, The New Statesman and Nation, 27 October 1934, pp. 588-89.
81 G. W. Stonier, ‘The Private Face’, The New Statesman and Nation, 28 May 1932, pp. 710-11.
82 Stonier, ‘A Poet of Iron’, p. 136.
83 Stephen Spender, ‘The Use of Poetry’, The New Statesman and Nation, 18 November 1933, pp. 637-38.
84 W. H. Auden: ‘Poem’, 16 July 1932, p. 69; ‘Poem’, 14 March 1936, p. 392; ‘Noah’s Song’, 13 June 1936, p, 931;
‘Song’, 16 January 1937, p. 81. C. Day Lewis: ‘You That Love England’, 3 December 1932, p. 691; ‘Sonnet’, 26
May 1934, p. 798; ‘Address to Death’, 1 May 1937, p. 721. Stephen Spender: ‘The Bird’, 27 May 1933, p. 684;
‘Perhaps’, 4 November 1933, p. 549; ‘The Town Shore at Barcelona’, 11 April 1936, p. 566; ‘Two Armies’, 8 May
1937, p. 770; ‘Regum Ultima Ratio’, 15 May 1937, p. 811; ‘War Photograph’, 5 June 1937, p. 922.
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temporality assigned to the previous (movement-based) revival is imprecise (‘once more’), it is
difficult not to detect a reliance on modernist poetry as providing the historical basis for this
framework. Thus previous modernists are not only acting as poetic models, as in Stonier’s
citation of Eliot and Lawrence as ‘master’ and ‘hero’, but as templates for criticism: this is now
simply what new poetry must look like in order to qualify as, in Stonier’s words, ‘interesting’.
This might be understood as a perspective on modernism that depends upon canonicity:
new work is published, but its newness is understood strictly in relation to an older, accepted
generation of modernist writers. But this will not quite do. The presence of those cynical,
metacultural assessments of new novels must be reckoned with, together with the insinuation
that many of these enthusiastic proponents of the Auden generation are blind followers,
uninterested in what exactly the poets might have to say. To repeat Stonier’s phrase, he argues
‘we may be sure that many who have followed in its [Auden generation] train have only the
vaguest idea of what it is all about, but are glad to know that there is something astir
somewhere’. Surely, this cynicism reflects two ways: openly, on the audience who blindly follow,
but also covertly on the poets themselves. If the Auden generation are followed simply because
they are a readily identifiable group, what does that imply about the calibre of their ideas and
poems? That search for ‘something […] somewhere’ might both contain optimism and conceal
a certain desperation: what if Auden et al. are being followed just because they are a group, and
thus identification is easy? Certainly, the centrality of the group as organizing principle for the
poetry runs strong. Samuel Hynes’ The Auden Generation addresses the group head on; other
major, broad studies of the period tend to treat these poets as a group.85 Not for nothing does
Orwell’s scathing attack on the Auden generation describe ‘a sort of Boy Scout atmosphere of
bare knees and community singing’: being in the group matters.86 The issue identified in
Stonier’s largely positive discussion of the group is that nagging sense of faintly desperate doubt
85 See, for example, A. T. Tolley, The Poetry of the Thirties (London: Gollancz, 1975); Valentine Cunningham, British
Writers of the Thirties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).
86 George Orwell, Inside the Whale and Other Essays (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962), p. 30. It is worth noting Janet
Montefiore’s argument that Orwell’s attack on the Auden generation is fundamentally flawed: see Men and Women
Writers of the 1930s: The Dangerous Flood of History (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 11-16.
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that, again, owes a lot to Overy’s morbid age: what if this poetry isn’t what it purports to be,
and thus there is no revival at hand?
One might fairly argue that such worries are endemic in criticism that heavily promotes
new work: the intellectual cost of doing business with propaganda, perhaps. Additionally, they
do not discount the genuine promise found in these poets, something the New Statesman critics
do believe in. But it remains true that these assessments cannot be entirely separated from the
awareness that this poetry’s newness is always defined relative to the modernist poetry that
came before it. The developing imposition of morbid cynicism—seen best in Connolly,
Mortimer, and Joad—means that this awareness of Auden et al. cannot be separated from a
worry that this praise might be unfounded. This is not simply a reiteration of Hawkins’
consideration of modernism and T. S. Eliot: worry is centred not around the haunting presence
of modernism’s rebellious past but around a morbid fear of broad, irreversible cultural decline.
In itself, the existence of this question mark over the poetry is not entirely problematic. But it
does mean that, for the New Statesman, praise for the Auden generation is never simply a matter
of enjoying poetry that builds upon the now-canonical modernist poets of the 1920s: that very
canonicity is always compromised by metacultural cynicism.
*
If praise for the Auden generation was subtly undercut by this cynicism, the New
Statesman was, as a rule, more openly concerned—confounded, even—by the work of James
Joyce. Even critics predisposed to appreciate Joyce’s new work struggled with Work in Progress.
Personally, I read all of Work in Progress I can get hold of, partly because I cannot believe that the
author of Ulysses is wasting his time, and because in other fragments I have found a genuine new
folk humour and fresh orchestration which will be found nowhere else in literature.87
The tone is defensive, almost plaintive, haunted by the possibility that Joyce’s new work might
not be worthy of ‘the author of Ulysses’. Stonier’s account of Work in Progress pivots around the
hope that Joyce might produce another Ulysses, coupled with the fear that he is not fulfilling his
87 G. W. Stonier, ‘Crazy Week’, The New Statesman and Nation, 3 December 1932, pp. 698-700 (p. 700).
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promise. Indeed, Stonier would go on to refer to Work in Progress as ‘that baffling work’.88 This
being said, Finnegans Wake could never be described as easy to read and analyse, and one might
argue that Stonier’s attempt to understand Work in Progress should be aligned with, say, Gerald
Bullett’s earnest discussion of consciousness in The Waves, even if Stonier eventually turns
against Joyce’s text.
Assessing how the New Statesman understood Joyce is of particular importance because in
1932 the magazine published a short text by Joyce. For a mainstream sixpenny weekly, this was
a publishing moment without precedent; the publication history is illuminating, and worth
detailing. Joyce had moved from Paris to London in April 1931. As Eleni Loukopoulou has
argued, from 1929 Joyce had his sights on London rather than Paris, and this was meant to be
a permanent move.89 While this would not turn out to be the case, for a short time in 1931
Joyce moved in the London social scene. A key friendship, it seems, was with Robert and Sylvia
Lynd, who according to Brenda Maddox Joyce had known ‘since he was struggling to get
Dubliners published’.90 The Joyces saw the Lynds a few days before their wedding (on 4 July),
and then again for their wedding lunch—which the Lynds hosted. The following week, on 15
July, the Lynds hosted one of their ‘literary parties’, with James Joyce as the guest of honour.91
Accounts suggest an unusual, memorable occasion: Joyce wearing two pairs of glasses, singing
Irish songs at the piano, and either reading part of Anna Livia Plurabelle or playing the Charles
Ogden recording (accounts differ).92 Presumably due to the New Statesman’s long association with
the Lynds, Kingsley Martin was also at the party, and wrote of what appears to be a
serendipitous meeting between himself and James Joyce.
He was standing in a corner in the deep shadow when I was introduced to him. I could see nothing
except a dark suit and the outline of his spectacles. He began talking volubly about a singer named
88 G. W. Stonier, ‘The Author of “Ulysses”’, The New Statesman and Nation, 3 February 1934, p. 158.
89 Eleni Loukopoulou, ‘Joyce’s Progress Through London: Conquering the English Publishing Market’, James Joyce
Quarterly, 48 (2011), 683-710 (p. 683).
90 Brenda Maddox, Nora: A Biography of Nora Joyce (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1988), p. 355.
91 See Maddox, Nora, pp. 358-9; Máire Gaster, ‘Joyce's Party Music’, in Writers and Hampstead: Observations on the
Place and the People, 101 Commentators from Domesday to Drabble, ed. by Ian Norrie (Hampstead: High Hill Press, 1987),
p. 106.
92 See Gaster, ‘Joyce's Party Music’, p. 106; Victor Gollancz, Reminiscences of Affection (London: Victor Gollancz,
1968), p. 90.
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Sullivan, who had been recently banned in England. His words poured out indignantly. Sullivan
was the greatest living singer. People talked of singing Otello. In Otello there were so many Gs in alt
and so many lower Cs. This was nothing. Sullivan could sing Guillaume Tell, which needed a far
greater range; in that part there were some hundreds of Gs in alt and even more lower Cs. […] I
suggested that he might write for the New Statesman and Nation about Sullivan. Eventually, after
some correspondence, he agreed, not to write an article direct for the paper, but to send us a letter
to his favourite singer.93
The suggestion that the piece was written after the party, specifically for the New Statesman is
unlikely, as discussed below. Martin then proceeds to misquote the last lines of the piece.94
Several months later, the piece appeared in the New Statesman, under the title ‘From a
Banned Writer to a Banned Singer’.95 On 27 February 1932, readers of the periodical would
have been able to open their copies and read, over a double page spread, new and original
work by James Joyce.96
He strides, booted with anger, along the spurs of Monte Rossini, accompanied solely by Fidelion,
his mastiff’s voice. They quarrel consonantly about the vocality of the wind, calling each and its
other clamant names.97
These are the opening lines of ‘From a Banned Writer to a Banned Singer’, a text that explores
and plays with opera and the performances of the Irish-French tenor John Sullivan (1877-1955).
It has received scant critical attention.98 The piece was published in the middle of the magazine,
following directly on from the letters page and under the heading of the ‘Miscellany’ section. It
is thirteen paragraphs written in the lexically dextrous, richly allusive and punning style in
which Joyce was writing what would become Finnegans Wake. Yet to describe ‘From a Banned
93 Martin, Editor, pp. 31-32.
94 Martin corrects Joyce’s spelling, changing ‘Guard safe our Geoge!’ to ‘Guard safe our George!’. See Martin,
Editor, p. 32.
95 For brevity, this piece will usually be referred to as ‘From A Banned Writer’.
96 The piece was reprinted in a Harvard journal, Hound & Horn, later in 1932. See James Joyce, ‘From A Banned
Writer To A Banned Singer’, Hound & Horn, 5 (1932), 542-46. This reprinting contains two small changes: in
paragraph seven, Hound & Horn has ‘yoelling’ against the New Statesman’s ‘yodelling’. Paragraph thirteen, H&H:
tussle-tusculums; NS: tussletusculums. In the absence of any further evidence, these are most likely printing errors.
97 James Joyce, ‘From a Banned Writer To a Banned Singer’, The New Statesman and Nation, 27 February 1932, pp.
260-61 (p. 260). This piece has been republished; see James Joyce, Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing, ed. by
Kevin Barry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 212-15.
98 Eleni Loukopoulou’s conference paper is the only scholarly work to focus on Joyce in the New Statesman; her
doctoral work on Joyce and London is forthcoming in print. Eleni Loukopoulou, ‘James Joyce in the New Statesman
and the Modernist Public Sphere’, paper at ‘MSA 15: Everydayness and the Event’, Brighton, 30 August 2013.
There is a critical body of work on Joyce and opera, but this tends to focus on Finnegans Wake and only mentions
‘From A Banned Writer’ in passing. In Joyce’s Grand Operoar (1997), Hodgart and Bauerle discuss Sullivan and trace
his appearances in the Wake, but do not mention the earlier piece. Judith Harrington writes of ‘From A Banned
Writer’ only to state that ‘Even opera buffs find it hard going’. See Matthew John Caldwell Hodgart and Ruth
Bauerle, Joyce's Grand Operoar: Opera in Finnegans Wake (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997); Judith Harrington,
James Joyce: Suburban Tenor (Dublin: National Library of Ireland, 2004), p. 32.
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Writer’ as merely an exercise in Wakean language and form is to diminish its importance. As
has rarely been acknowledged, this text is like nothing else Joyce published at this stage in his
career. By 1932, he had been publishing what was then Work in Progress for several years in
transition, and had issued short sections of that text in pamphlets.99 ‘From a Banned Writer’
stands unique as the only thing Joyce published that was in the style of what would become the
Wake, yet was not a part of it.100
Where ‘From A Banned Writer’ has been discussed it is usually in terms of its subject,
the ‘Banned Singer’ John Sullivan. Joyce met Sullivan in 1929 and promoted him heavily in the
following years; as Nino Frank, a friend and translator of Joyce would recall, for a time
‘Finnegans Wake did not exist. Only O’Sullivan existed. The work was interrupted because Joyce
was only interested in O’Sullivan and opera.’101 Judith Harrington suggests that Joyce ‘became
in effect Sullivan’s (unwanted) agent’, and Joyce promoted Sullivan in three ways.102 The first
was to attend performances by Sullivan and his closest competitors, to cheer on Sullivan
theatrically and wildly, and abuse Sullivan’s competitors. On one particular occasion, Joyce
claimed loudly that Sullivan’s singing had restored his sight.103 The second way was to publish
letters promoting Sullivan’s singing in newspapers and periodicals. In a letter written to Harriet
Shaw Weaver in March 1930, Joyce claimed
99 The first extract from Work in Progress was published in the transatlantic review in August 1924. Joyce continued to
publish the text in a variety of magazines, but above all Eugene Jolas’ transition. Seventeen issues of the magazine
would contain sections of Work in Progress between April 1927 and May 1938. Joyce also published parts of Work in
Progress in pamphlets. For full details, see Appendix 2 in How Joyce Wrote Finnegans Wake: a Chapter-by-chapter Genetic
Guide, ed. by Luca Crispi and Sam Slote (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), pp. 490-94.
100 Joyce did also publish in newspapers and periodicals, but he was never prolific. He started writing Finnegans
Wake in 1923; in between this point, and his death in 1941, he authored just six pieces in periodicals. If publication
of letters between Joyce and other private individuals are included—which does not sufficiently describe ‘From a
Banned Writer’—the total rises by just five. See John J. Slocum and Herbert Cahoon, A Bibliography of James Joyce,
1882-1941 (London: R. Hart-Davis, 1957).
101 Nino Frank is here quoted by Arnold Goldman, who interviewed Frank for a Radio 3 documentary on Joyce
and Sullivan. Note also that Sullivan’s surname was actually O’Sullivan, as Frank recalls, but that Joyce
encouraged him to drop the ‘O’ for British audiences. See Arnold Goldman, ‘“Send Him Canorious”—Arnold
Goldman writes about James Joyce's “Sullivanising”’, The Listener, 3 August 1972, pp. 142-44 (p. 142).
102 Harrington, Suburban Tenor, p. 32.
103 Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 624-25.
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to have got him [Sullivan] very fine notices in the Morning Post (twice), Daily Telegraph, Daily News,
Manchester Guardian, Irish Independent, Irish Statesman, Chicago Daily Tribune, New York World, New York
Sun (twice), Daily Mail, New York Times with photograph, l’Intransigeant and La Rampe of Paris.104
Note the distinction between these notices—perhaps published at Joyce’s instigation but not
written by him or directly associated with his name—and the act of publishing ‘From a Banned
Writer’. Third, Joyce did use his influence as a writer: Ellmann relates how Joyce went to visit
Nancy Cunard—whom he had not met—and insisted that she ask her mother, Lady Cunard,
to suggest to her friend the orchestra leader Sir Thomas Beecham that Sullivan should be
engaged. Suggestions that he should appeal to Beecham directly were of no avail, and Joyce
even suggested at a later meeting that ‘if Sullivan were engaged, a little piece of writing by a
well-known author might find its way to the Hours Press [owned by Nancy Cunard] for
publication. She spoke to her mother again.’105 Harrington also suggests that Joyce asked the
composer George Antheil to collaborate with him on an opera expressly for Sullivan.106 None
of these activities quite resembles the act of publishing the experimental prose of ‘From a
Banned Writer’. A few months after publication, Stonier would write his worried account of
Joyce’s new work. If this fairly represents the opinion of even a sympathetic reader, the
achievement of placing twelve paragraphs of deeply experimental prose in front of an audience
of tens of thousands must be emphasized.
‘From a Banned Writer’ explores different aspects of Sullivan’s career as a tenor.
Consider the fourth paragraph.
Who is this that advances in maresblood caftan, like Hiesous in Finisterre, his eyeholes
phyllistained, his jewbones of a crossbacked? A little child shall lead him. Why, it’s Strongman
Simpson, Timothy Nathan, now of Simpson’s on the Grill! Say, Tim Nat, bald wine-presser, hast
not one air left? But yeth he hath. Regard! Auscult! He upbraces for supremacy to the potence of
Mosthigh and calls upon his baiters and their templum: You daggones, be flat!107
Joyce deploys a series of allusions to the narrative of Samson. There is a man with ‘eyeholes
phyllistained’ (stained or blinded by the Philistines (Judges 16:21)), led by a little child he is
104 Letters of James Joyce, ed. by Stuart Gilbert and Richard Ellmann, 3 vols (London: Faber and Faber, 1957-1966),
I, 290 (to Harriet Shaw Weaver, 18 March 1930).
105 Ellmann, James Joyce, p. 626.
106 Harrington, Suburban Tenor, p. 32.
107 Joyce, ‘From a Banned Writer To a Banned Singer’, p. 220.
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‘Strongman Simpson’ (16:26), with associations to ‘Tim Nat’ (Timnath, home of Samson’s first
wife (14:1-2)), who becomes ‘bald’ (16:19); in his last ‘air’ he attacks ‘his baiters and their
templum’ (16:29-31). As Samson pulls the temple down around them, they are to ‘be flat’,
which is also the last note (B♭) sung by Samson in Saint-Saens’s opera, Samson et Delila.108 Joyce
had witnessed Sullivan perform the role.109
The piece as a whole rehearses a variety of operas that Sullivan performed. Alongside
Samson et Delila, there are allusions to Beethoven’s Fidelio, Berlioz’s Damnation of Faust, Verdi’s
Otello, Rossini’s Guillaume Tell, Wagner’s Die Valkyre and Tannhauser and Meyerbeer’s Les
Huguenots. My intention here is not to offer a full commentary on this piece, although it does
deserve close consideration. Suffice it to say, though, that in this compressed form Joyce’s text is
at once deeply allusive and playful, nodding to different operatic characters and moments while
cramming the text with puns and noise and urban landscapes and comedy. Sullivan’s voice was
often characterised as strong, rather than elegant, and one of Joyce’s ways to argue for Sullivan
was to emphasize his technical ability to hit the high notes in operas (such as Guillaume Tell)
shunned by singers with a lesser range.110 Similarly, this piece is Joyce at his loudest and
brashest, and might be understood best as an extraordinary, virtuosic performance: Joyce’s
attempt to render in words what Sullivan does with music.
Is not the mere presence of a text such as this in a sixpenny weekly review evidence of
modernism’s canonical status? To an extent, it should be acknowledged that the fact that
Kingsley Martin, as editor, was able to meet Joyce at a London party and argue that the New
Statesman could play a role in publishing his new work speaks volumes about the public role of
modernism at this time. At this time, Work in Progress was appearing in transition, a little
magazine with a typically small circulation; short sections of Joyce’s work were printed as
108 The analysis of this passage is indebted to Kevin Barry’s notes on ‘From a Banned Writer’. See Joyce, Occasional,
Critical, and Political Writing, pp. 346-7.
109 Ellmann, James Joyce, p. 620.
110 Harrington, Suburban Tenor, pp. 32-33. Stuart Gilbert wrote of attending performances with Joyce and collating
statistics of the high notes that Sullivan was able to sing. See Reflections on James Joyce: Stuart Gilbert's Paris Journal, ed.
by Randolph Lewis and Thomas F. Staley (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993), p. 15.
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222
pamphlets and, as mentioned above, gained some praise but also baffled the critics.111 The New
Statesman printed what would now be referred to as Wakean prose for an audience in the tens of
thousands.
However, the relationship between this text and the magazine that carries it is complex;
furthermore, I contend that a reading of ‘From a Banned Writer’ sympathetic to Joyce—such
as the one given above—becomes difficult to sustain once the periodical context is taken into
account. Clearly, this was an unusual text for a periodical of this type to publish, a fact perhaps
best borne out by the odd implications of its location in the magazine. As has been discussed
throughout this thesis, location can indicate form: the book reviews are not at the front. What,
then, is this piece? Is it a letter, as it appears directly following the letters, is titled ‘From…To’,
and is labelled as such in the introduction? Is it in some strange way a poem, as poems were
most typically printed immediately after the letters, and it does not following regular prose
rhythms? Or is it a light-hearted middle, as other entries in the ‘Miscellany’ section of the New
Statesman often were? I am not attempting to suggest that a better, clearer position is possible:
merely that the nature of this piece, combined with the nature of this periodical, means that the
identity of this text is rendered unclear, or at least unstable.
In the New Statesman, ‘From a Banned Writer’ has a key paratext: it is published with a
preface, which offers an explanation of the text’s route to the magazine, and suggests how it
might be read. It is quoted in full below.
In this remarkable document, Mr James Joyce gives his impressions of his friend, Mr Sullivan of
the Paris Opera, in several of his leading roles. Many competent critics regard Mr Sullivan as the
most extraordinary dramatic tenor that Europe has listened to for the last half century. Mr Joyce
complains that Mr Sullivan is ‘banned’ or at least unknown in England. The reflections written
here were sent in a letter to Mr Sullivan by Mr Joyce after an occasion on which the singer was
carried shoulder high by his Marseilles admirers after an astonishing performance in ‘Guillaume
Tell’. One knows of no other similar documents, no letters in a tone of intense admiration and
sardonic banter sent by, say, Manzoni to Rubini, or by Flaubert to Gilbert Duprez, or by Ibsen to
the Swedish Nightingale. Lovers of grand opera will recognise the operatic situations and phrases
with which the text is studded and detect under the mark of their Christian names the three divi
111 According to a table drawn up by Thacker, the peak circulation of transition was 4000 copies. Andrew Thacker,
‘General Introduction: “Magazines, Magazines, Magazines!”’, in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist
Magazines: Volume II, North America 1894-1960, ed. by Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2012), pp. 1-28 (p. 17).
THE NEW STATESMAN AND NATION, 1931-37
223
who feature in the final quartette. The document which the singer has kindly placed at our disposal
is published with Mr Joyce’s permission.112
That use of the word ‘document’ (twice) to describe the text that follows is an oddly formal
choice. It seems to indicate simply that the New Statesman was not entirely sure how to classify
exactly what they were publishing. Given the unusual nature of ‘From a Banned Writer’, this is
entirely understandable. But the introduction gives useful contextual information—in that it
introduces Sullivan—before attempting to proffer what seems to be an authoritative
interpretation of the text’s provenance and nature. There are three claims: first, that these
thoughts were sent ‘in a letter’ from Joyce to Sullivan, following a specific performance of
William Tell in Marseilles. Second, the letter should be likened to historical discussions between
artists (for example, Flaubert/Duprez); third, sufficient operatic knowledge will allow one to
‘recognise the operatic situations and phrases with which the text is studded’.
The first of these three claims—that the text was inspired by a specific performance of
Sullivan’s in Marseilles, and the proceeding celebrations—may well be true, though it does
gloss over the fact that ‘From a Banned Writer’ refers not just to Guillaume Tell but to a range of
Sullivan’s performances. But the second and third claims are more troubling. To trace this text
to a letter and liken it to communication between artists imagines that this is simply Joyce’s
equivalent of a thank-you note, written in the normal course of friendship and reproduced
here.113 The modernist writer is thus envisaged as a strange being alienated from regular
epistolary prose. In fact, it is quite clear that the piece was not simply a letter sent for the
purposes of communication but a carefully crafted and revised literary text. Hans Walter
Gabler, editing this text for the James Joyce Archive, suggests that the piece was composed in two
halves. The first half moves from a transcription in Sylvia Beach’s hand to a typescript, with
112 Joyce, ‘From a Banned Writer To a Banned Singer’, p. 260. This piece of text is included in Barry’s Occasional,
Critical and Political Writing, but in the notes to the text, rather than as a preface.
113 Martin’s account of the text’s route to the New Statesman in his autobiography is more demonstrably misleading.
He implies that Joyce’s piece was conceived following the party in July 1931, but manuscript evidence strongly
suggests that the text was already largely complete by this stage: a letter sent from Joyce to Herbert Gorman
proposes some small corrections and is dated 1 April 1931. See James Joyce, Notes, Criticism, Translations, &
Miscellaneous Writings: A Facsimile of Manuscripts & Typescripts, ed. by Hans Walter Gabler, The James Joyce Archive,
2 vols (New York: Garland Publishing, 1979), I, 326.
THE NEW STATESMAN AND NATION, 1931-37
224
additions and edits. The second half exists in Joyce’s hand, and then both halves are combined
in a typescript that is close, but not identical to the version published in the New Statesman.114
Envisaging the text as communication sets the stage for the instructions on how to read
this piece: if one knows enough about opera, one will be able to ‘recognise’ and ‘detect’ the
allusions and references. Reading Joyce is now an act of decoding. This places the New
Statesman’s introduction to Joyce’s piece in the context of a key trend in Joyce’s reception in the
thirties, as Ulysses was cleared for publication and came into the public sphere. Barbara Leckie
discusses a number of reading guides to Ulysses that appeared around this time, guides that
offered the tantalizing possibility ‘to transform Ulysses from an obscure and difficult book to a
simple and easy read’.115 Notes and guides to Ulysses are clearly useful to many readers, then and
now, and might be said to be even more so for a text like ‘From a Banned Writer’ that operates
in very specific musical contexts. But there is a crucial distinction between useful notes and a
preface that offers an explicatory key: the latter models the Joycean text as something that only
makes sense once it has been rewritten in a particular way. And as great as these problems
might be for a reading guide that sits alongside Ulysses—Leckie considers, among other texts, an
advertisement for the novel in the Saturday Review of Literature that offers a schemata for the
book’s sections—such reading guides were not published as prefaces. Leckie relates a key
anecdote:
Before the 1933 trial a misunderstanding arose between Paul Léon, Joyce, Herbert Gorman, and
Bennett Cerf, the Random House publisher, over a key (a chart detailing the correspondences,
colours, organs and so on) that Cerf wanted to include in the Random House edition of Ulysses.
Léon, on Joyce’s behalf, refused: ‘I imagine an American reader’, he wrote, ‘seeing the chart and
concluding that since he has to study it before reading it is not worthwhile reading the book. It may
defeat its purpose.’116
The case of ‘From a Banned Writer’, with that introductory paragraph sitting in front of the
text, is thus a more serious case of the above problem: it is almost truistic to note that Joyce’s
text is not reducible in this way, and cannot be decoded.
114 Joyce, Notes, Criticism, Translations, I, xxx.
115 Barbara Leckie, ‘“Short Cuts to Culture”: Censorship and Modernism; or, Learning to Read Ulysses’, in Joyce's
Audiences, ed. by John Nash (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002), pp. 9-28 (p. 23).
116 Leckie, ‘Learning to Read Ulysses’, p. 22.
THE NEW STATESMAN AND NATION, 1931-37
225
Jacques Derrida, perhaps one of the most sensitive readers of the ways in which reading
Joyce can be difficult, writes of the intimidating complexity of the prose before remarking that
I have the feeling that I haven’t yet begun to read Joyce, and this ‘not having begun to read’ is
sometimes the most singular and active relationship I have with this work.117
John Nash makes a similar case more bluntly: arguments that emphasize the importance of a
hyper-competent reader are troubling simply because Joyce’s ‘writing undermines the very idea
of competence through its resistance to explication’.118 When the New Statesman proposes that
we should read the text in this way, something is lost.
Reading ‘From a Banned Writer’ simply as a letter containing a mesh of ‘operatic
situations’ is ultimately deeply frustrating. Odd questions become legitimate: if this is a letter to
Sullivan, why does he appear throughout the text? Why, in the very first lines, is he
accompanied by a version of Nipper, the dog from the famous ‘His Master’s Voice’
advertisements?119 Discussions of (say) musicality, rhythm, the play and tension between
meanings—all the complexities of Joycean prose that Derrida writes of memorably, the ‘quasi-
infinite speed of the movements of Joyce’s cables’—all these are lost in the quest for simple
meaning, the quest to ask why.120
But still, there are further problems. Those who do come to the text with operatic
knowledge will find that their knowledge is put to work deciphering puns: seeing ‘Philistined’ in
‘phyllistained’, or ‘B♭’ in ‘be flat’. The why that the introduction pushes the reader to search
for thus rewards the New Statesman reader not with the promised evidence of Joyce’s artistic
communion with Sullivan, but with moments of empty revelation: poor jokes. Joyce’s dexterous
and intelligent punning becomes, under this interpretative frame, a mechanism that continually
promises meaning only to deny it utterly.
117 Jacques Derrida, ‘Two Words for Joyce’, in Post-structuralist Joyce: Essays from the French, ed. by Derek Attridge
and Daniel Ferrer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 148-59 (p. 148).
118 John Nash, James Joyce and the Act of Reception: Reading, Ireland, Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2006), p. 9.
119 Peter Martland, Recording History: The British Record Industry, 1888-1931 (London: The Scarecrow Press, 2013), pp.
55-56.
120 Derrida, ‘Two Words for Joyce’, p. 147.
THE NEW STATESMAN AND NATION, 1931-37
226
The following week, the New Statesman published a letter sent in by a reader, Alex R.
Andreae. It was a mocking rejoinder to ‘From a Banned Writer’, an argument in cod Joycean
prose that Joyce’s own work is childlike nonsense.
Ah Yah! to bestrew the nursery-kitchen of language with pepperous tumult! Babysense, nonsense,
innocence, horse-sense sneezed into a stickfast coryza of snufflewords and tishoo sounds! Allons
and alors, let him in with his blik blak night idiom and eclipse tricks. No banned even if
mistrepanned at bottleage, or stonedropped—crok, crak goes the wobble Kindskopf! Rien ne va
plus!121
Like the parody of Stein’s rose, discussed above (though Andreae’s letter lacks the pithy wit of
that phrase), this text unsubtly transforms Joyce’s text into nonsense prose. It is quite easy,
retrospectively, to look back and look down on this sardonic dismissal of Joyce’s work. This is,
one perceives, a reader who fails to see what Joyce is trying to do with language, someone who
looks at modernism and sees only nonsense. The problem with this is that under the frame that
the New Statesman sets out for ‘From a Banned Writer’, a reaction like that of Andreae remains
in many ways entirely legitimate. Under these terms, the text might well be ‘horse-sense
sneezed into a stickfast coryza of snufflewords’.
Such a situation emerges because of the problematic nature of the New Statesman’s
paratext. While ‘From a Banned Writer’ can of course be read however a reader chooses—and
it is perfectly plausible to imagine a contemporary reader studying Joyce’s piece closely and
deciding to dismiss the magazine’s introduction—it is nevertheless significant that the magazine
promotes, as strongly as such paratextual elements allow, an interpretation of Joyce’s prose that
is concerned with achieving the necessary level of competence in order to successfully decode it.
The attempt to model Joycean prose in this specific way is profoundly flawed. Modernism’s
place in the literary canon is thus troubled not by a deep-seated critical worry about
legitimacy—as, I argue, is true in the case of the Auden generation—but by the lack of such a
worry, in the presence of an ultimately reductive interpretation that impinges upon, and thus
alters, Joyce’s difficult and extraordinary text. To be blunt, the New Statesman treats Joyce’s new
work as that of a canonical author, there to be published and marvelled at. There is, naturally,
121 Alex R. Andreae, ‘A Banned Writer [Letter]’, The New Statesman and Nation, 5 March 1932, p. 292.
THE NEW STATESMAN AND NATION, 1931-37
227
no problem with this. But the magazine develops this conviction of canonicity into a critical
perspective that can only be seen as limited, and problematic.
The consequences of these troubles may well be far-reaching. In the weekly reviews, in
the 1930s, modernism emerges into public life: the New Statesman begins to treat modernist texts
as canonical even as it worries about the implications of granting such canonicity. But the case
of ‘From a Banned Writer’ suggests that some modernist texts may operate in such a way that
actively resists the ultimately normalizing process of such canonization. If there is such a thing,
any longer, as a literary canon, then Joyce is certainly in it; if that fact was still uncertain in the
1930s, it can hardly be said to be so now. Yet one wonders, had ‘From a Banned Writer’ been
completed yet remained unpublished, and were the contemporary New Statesman to publish it as
a new text by Joyce, might there not be a letter, very similar to that by Alex R. Andreae, sent in
to the magazine the following week? This is not a derisory glance at inadequate audiences;
instead, it is the suggestion that in some ways, certain aspects of modernism resist their own
canonization even as they emerge, hand in hand with their critics, into public life. Recall
Derrida’s argument above, that he engaged with Joyce’s work by recognizing that he had not
even begun to read it.122 This may well be central to the type of art that Joyce was producing,
but it is not something that the weekly reviews—guardians of official culture—successfully
appreciate. In the New Statesman, in the 1930s, one can see the emergence of modernism into
public culture: not, in the end, clear-cut and triumphant, but murky, troubled, and forever
incomplete.
122 Derrida, ‘Two Words for Joyce’, p. 148.
228
CONCLUSION
I return to Time and Tide. On 30 November 1927, this young magazine held an event at the
Hyde Park Hotel named an ‘At Home’, for its readers. All those who had subscribed since 1922
or earlier were sent invitations, but any other readers were also welcome. Guests heard
‘speeches from the Directors’ and took part in a discussion; the paper claimed that ‘this is a
good method of keeping that close touch between the paper and its public which is essential to
the well-being of any journal’.1 To mark the occasion in the magazine, two of the speeches (by
Rebecca West and Margaret Thomas, Lady Rhondda) were transcribed and printed. The
record of Rhondda’s speech makes it quite clear just how highly she valued her endeavour with
a weekly review.
I believe that the day will come, and that fairly soon, when no educated household will be found
without a Weekly Review on its table. The Weekly Reviews to-day have comparatively small
circulations, but they have a high office—the highest office, I believe, in journalism. More and
more already this is coming to be realised. More and more as time goes on it will be appreciated,
and they will come to be recognised for what they are, the opinion-papers. But for that two parties
must share, for that those who read as well as those who write are necessary… The Weekly Review,
the paper which is trying not merely to talk but to think—requires if it is to be fully alive and to
take advantage of all its possibilities, an intimacy of relationship between public and paper which is
quite a peculiar thing, a kind of building up of an organic whole so that it does come to represent
the approximate point of view of its public, whether they be writers or readers. Only so can it be
effectively one of the opinion makers of the world…2
Of course, it must be remembered that Rhondda edited the magazine; a number of her friends
wrote for it; she was speaking to subscribers and interested readers, and she had invested some
of her personal fortune in the magazine. In other words, it is hardly surprising that she speaks as
if Time and Tide will change the world, in perhaps a week’s time. I mention this not to mock
Rhondda’s belief in her magazine, but merely to place her remarks in a proper context and to
acknowledge just how seriously some people took the project of a new weekly review.
Yet from a scholarly perspective, it is vitally important that this slightly overblown
rhetoric does not bewitch us into over-inflating the importance and impact of these magazines,
1 ‘[It is now three years since...]’, Time and Tide, 28 October 1927, p. 955.
2 Margaret Haig Thomas and Rebecca West, ‘The Function of the Weekly Review’, Time and Tide, 9 December
1927, pp. 1114-15 (p. 1114).
CONCLUSION
229
especially when it comes to exploring their relationship with modernism. Time and Tide, the
Nation and Athenaeum, the Spectator, the Listener, and the New Statesman were important, culturally
influential magazines that circulated to tens of thousands of people, but they neither changed
the world nor single-handedly introduced the concept of modernism to the British public. They
played a part in a broader narrative, though I do maintain that their part was an important one.
At the same time, the image that I have constructed is limited. While I hope to have provided
some fragmented, partial histories that shed some light on how modernism came into public
being in the 1920s and 1930s, and on a group of woefully under-read magazines, I think this
thesis can only have value if it recognizes that the narratives it charts remain incomplete: there
is far more to be done.
On the one hand, these periodicals deserve far more in depth histories than I have been
able to provide. While Time and Tide is well served by Catherine Clay’s on-going work, the same
cannot be said for the other magazines studied here. Keynes’s reign at the Nation and Athenaeum
has not been adequately addressed here or elsewhere, to say nothing of Massingham’s Nation.
The Spectator and the New Statesman have published institutional histories to mark important
anniversaries, but that fact that these texts originated in celebration results in an unfortunate
tendency towards hagiography: these fascinating magazines require more. The Listener is
discussed in Debra Rae Cohen’s upcoming work on the BBC and interwar print culture, but
such is the richness of this extraordinary publication that there is ample scope for further work.
Furthermore, I have focused only on an eighteen-year span in the early twentieth century. One
wonders what could be made of the role of the mainstream literary periodical in the later years
of the twentieth century, as literary studies grew as an academic discipline, and academic
journals rose in number and influence.
In this thesis, however, my focus has been on representations of and responses to
modernism. I have argued that weekly reviews played an important role in developing a public
concept of modernism, not merely when they embraced new, experimental literature, but when
CONCLUSION
230
they reacted with scepticism; from across the spectrum of responses, modernism emerged. The
essays in this thesis have explored this argument in different ways. In Time and Tide, I argued
that at the start of the 1920s modernism’s place in the public eye was not clear. In some cases,
the magazine studied modernist texts only to reject them robustly; at best, the magazine’s
reviews were demonstrably unsure whether or not this new literature was legitimate. In the
Nation and Athenaeum, the weekly review proved far more willing to closely read and praise
modernist texts, but Leonard Woolf’s dislike for his job demanded a model for reading a
periodical that did not depend upon editorial passion. In the Spectator, a conservative periodical
remained sceptical about modernist literature, but was in fact able to read and review that
literature in such a way that refashioned it as acceptable to the Spectator’s conservative ideology.
This move towards the latter half of the 1920s notes a clear shift in modernism’s public
emergence. If Time and Tide was unsure about modernism, and the Nation and Athenaeum’s praise
was surely coloured by its association with Bloomsbury (and hence the identity of its reviewers),
the Spectator’s ability to find cultural value in Eliot and Woolf and Joyce—even if its critical
refashionings do sometimes prove problematic—is significant. In the Listener, a quietly radical
editor carved out a space to print, review, and thus promote new poetry by W. H. Auden and
his contemporaries. Janet Adam Smith’s editorial practice was undoubtedly a rebellious
challenge to the form of the weekly review that the BBC wished to produce, and, in 1933, she
succeeded in confronting readers with the heady mix of Raverat’s art and Auden’s ‘The
Witnesses’. In the New Statesman in the 1930s, modernism’s place in the literary tradition seems,
at times, assured: when the magazine heralds the latest great work by Virginia Woolf, or prints
a particularly intelligent and witty pastiche of The Waste Land. But from the poetry reviews, and
the analysis of Joyce’s ‘From a Banned Writer’, it becomes clear that modernism’s emergence
into public being is not so simple, and its place in the canon remained uncertain.
In many ways, rehearsing the coverage of these chapters prompts only calls for further
study. While Rose Macaulay’s Potterism perhaps goes too far in its classifications of the ‘penny,
CONCLUSION
231
the twopenny, the threepenny, and the shilling public’, not to mention the sixpenny public and
that of ‘the new Pinkerton fourpenny’, the magazines covered here are by no means the only
mainstream literary journals to study modernism.3 There is, especially, more work to be done
on the cheaper magazines that had less of a political focus, and did not take themselves quite so
seriously. Furthermore, the nature of studying magazines with such a high periodicity results,
always, in texts and critics that deserve attention and do not—cannot—receive it. Take, for
instance, a 1926 review in the Nation and Athenaeum of Herbert Read’s literary criticism, titled
‘Machines to Think With’. One wonders if the title echoes Le Corbusier (refashioned, of course,
for writers), yet it also seems to link Read with the analytical tone of I. A. Richards’s literary
criticism.
Mr Read makes his machines work. These essays are austere, learned, compact, and brief. There is
here no easy floating on the tide of emotional appreciation to nowhere in particular. The writing is
as scientifically precise as the union between a science and an art will allow.4
Or, a very different review in the Spectator, as Richard Church (before he began to publish
poetry in the Listener) seems to resolve the agonies that Time and Tide experienced reading
Lawrence, and locates in Lawrence’s work the prospect of stability in the chaos of modernity.
In all the agony of this modern life, with the harsh noise of it, destroying thought, and faith, and
the sweet lingering enjoyment of solitude and all its timeless love, I find myself turning to Lawrence
again and again with a sense of companionship; saying that here is one who knows this modern
danger, this crash of beliefs, this sudden loss of enthusiasm; one who is fighting to find the meaning
of it, and to locate the something permanent that it cannot destroy.5
This from a magazine that endorsed the ban on The Well of Loneliness, and did not even deign to
mention Lady Chatterley’s Lover until 1930. Even for my necessarily partial reading of these
periodicals, there are always more intriguing examples to turn to, worthy of scholarly
attention—though I remain unsure what precisely to do with T. S. Eliot’s short, informative
letter to the New Statesman in 1935.
3 Rose Macaulay, Potterism: A Tragi-Farcical Tract (London: W. Collins Sons & Co., 1920), pp. 251-52.
4 ‘Machines to Think With’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 7 August 1926, pp. 532-33.
5 Richard Church, ‘D. H. Lawrence: The Artist’, The Spectator, 19 April 1930, pp. 670-71 (p. 670).
CONCLUSION
232
Mr David Garnett (reviewing Mr Osbert Burdett’s book) is in error in supposing that there is no
tolerable American cheese. There is a delicious cheese of Port Salut type made by Trappist monks
in Ontario.6
Eliot was, at least, clearly a careful reader of the sixpenny weekly review.
The problem of selective reading remains: to read and then quote from these magazines
can sometimes feel like taking water from a swimming pool with a teaspoon. Nevertheless, I
argue that these magazines show how modernism emerged into public life, in Britain, in the
1920s and 1930s. The idea that we have come to call modernism did not begin in these
magazines. Its origins are perhaps too disparate and multiple to ever fully trace. But they are
not to be found here. When these magazines come to think about modernism, they are well and
truly late to the party. However, this tardiness has its own value. When these magazines do turn,
in seriousness, to modernism, they think publicly on how such new, striking, challenging,
terrifying literature might, in time, be accepted as wholly legitimate. The modernism that sat
comfortably on a university syllabus in, say, 1960 was clearly something very different to the
cultural phenomenon vaguely gestured at when Thomas Moult sneered, in Time and Tide, at
‘the spell of the ultra-modern’.7 Put another way, though these magazines may be broadly
reactive in nature—their normal role is not to publish new literary texts, but to evaluate and
analyse publications—they do not simply record a concept of modernism that sits concretely in
early twentieth century literary culture, independent of its representations in periodicals such as
these. To return a final time to my reading of Ian Hacking, modernism emerged ‘hand in hand’
with these discussions of modernism, taking public form even as it was explored by these
periodicals.
Yet these magazines—particularly, here, the New Statesman in the 1930s—imply also that
this public emergence had no easily placed end date, no moment of final, public clarity and
legitimacy. As much as these magazines proved more and more willing to take modernist texts
seriously, there always seem to be cases where they could not get completely comfortable. This
6 T. S. Eliot, ‘Cheese [letter]’, The New Statesman and Nation, 21 December 1935, p. 977.
7 Thomas Moult, ‘Poetry: Emily Dickinson to May Sinclair’, Time and Tide, 7 November 1924, p. 1091.
CONCLUSION
233
should not, I think, be seen as a failing. For if modernism is certainly canonical now, it seems
never to stop exerting pressure on literary culture. David James and Urmila Seshagiri write on
the concept of ‘metamodernism’, arguing that modernism has a ‘surprisingly persistent legacy’
in ‘twenty-first century arts and letters’: that a number of contemporary novelists are writing
new fiction that engages with old modernism.8 But the point is that modernism is not old, closed,
or finished, but something that still demands attention from new novelists, and (later) their
critics. As James and Seshagiri ask, ‘What artistic issues emerge when innovators today open up
alternative futures for fiction through engagements with their modernist past?’.9
To point out that modernism continues to be of interest is no great claim, but the
particular value in the idea of ‘metamodernism’ is that the concept puzzled over by the weekly
reviews still impinges on literary culture now. Perhaps the weekly reviews were never entirely
satisfied with modernism, even as it emerged into public life. But if modernism continues to
excite, frustrate, and make demands of writers today, this uncertainty is only to be expected.
Modernism may now be canonical, but it is rarely quiet and comfortable: this, too, was first
echoed in the weekly reviews.
8 David James and Urmila Seshagiri, ‘Metamodernism: Narratives of Continuity and Resolution’, PMLA, 129
(2014), 87-100 (p. 87).
9 James and Seshagiri, ‘Metamodernism’, p. 88.
234
APPENDIX A: FINANCES
Weekly reviews were not by and large profitable enterprises. Anecdotally, it is clear that most
made a loss and were supported by patronage of one form or another, as is discussed
throughout this study. In the case of the Nation and Athenaeum, financial reports have survived
that document the loss-making endeavour in detail; these are adapted here for the reader’s
interest. Note that these include some figures that predate Keynes’s ownership of the Nation and
Athenaeum; these presumably refer to Massingham’s Nation.
Source: Cambridge, King’s College Special Collections (KCSC), J. M. Keynes Papers,
King’s/PP/JMK/NS/3/23.
FINANCES
235
Table 1: The Nation and Athenaeum finances, 1917-30
Year ended April 1917 1918 1919 1920 1921 1922 1923
Expenditure £6871 £7943 £9547 £12,997 £16,765 £15,034 £14,430
Receipts £4800 £5798 £7001 £9094 £10,280 £11,262 £12,002
Loss -£2071 -£2145 -£2546 -£3902 -£6485 -£3772 -£2428
Chief Costs
Paper £1023 £1405 £2246 £1936 £3058 £1889 £1314
Printing £1264 £1514 £2011 £3444 £4697 £4721 £4445
Salaries £1602 £1712 £1899 £2924 £3485 £3908 £3789
Contributors £1718 £2034 £1828 £2398 £3004 £2809 £3129
Chief Receipts
Advertisements (Net) £362 £840 £1284 £2752 £3062 £3912 £4382
Sales (Net) (including
Subscriptions)
£4372 £4910 £5655 £6199 £7131 £7327 £7567
Year ended April 1924 1925 1926 1927 1928 1929 1930
Expenditure £15,873 £15,934 £17,244 £17,626 £18,033 £18,450 £18,559
Receipts £13,505 £15,189 £16,105 £16,981 £17,743 £18,259 £18,278
Loss -£2368 -£747 -£1139 -£645 -£290 -£200 -£279
Chief Costs
Paper £1582 £1772 £1898 £1868 £2047 £1992 £1930
Printing £4558 £4715 £5129 £5235 £5351 £5243 £4965
Salaries £4247 £4371 £4930 £5134 £5022 £5369 £5703
Contributors £3686 £3236 £3232 £3462 £3575 £3568 £3888
Chief Receipts
Advertisements (Net) £5232 £5958 £7229 £7698 £8574 £8441 £8193
Sales (Net) (including
Subscriptions)
£8230 £8924 £8567 £9028 £8932 £8919 £9046
236
APPENDIX B: CIRCULATIONS
The table below summarizes my attempts to gather circulation data for the five periodicals
covered by this study. Historical circulation data is frustratingly incomplete and can be hard to
come by. The managers of a magazine could of course calculate their circulation by adding
together their sales and subscription figures. However, this data was rarely published, and
therefore has not been preserved in all cases. Circulation figures were of great interest to
advertisers—naturally, an advertisement in a higher circulation periodical was more
expensive—and in some cases circulation figures can be found for 1922-30 in the Advertiser’s
ABC, an annually issued directory. However, these figures were provided by publishers, and not
independently audited. Several periodicals record identical figures year-on-year, or provide
suspiciously round numbers, suggesting that the publishers either did not always submit data or
provided estimates. In the latter case, it is also likely that the estimates were on the generous
side, as the publisher had every reason to talk up the popularity of their periodical. In 1931, the
Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) was set up to provide independently audited figures. This
body still exists today.1 However, its early reports are not publicly available.
I have not included circulation figures given in biographies in the table, as these tend to
be provided in an anecdotal form, and are less easy to verify. These numbers are instead given
in the notes below on individual periodicals.
Time and Tide
Almost no figures are available for Time and Tide. Work on this periodical tends to cite Shirley
Eoff’s figure of 12,000 to 15,000 copies, taken from notes held by Rebecca West. Eoff attributes
this figure to ‘the early 1920s’, but her source is end of year financial reports for 1927 and 1928,
1 See abc.org.uk
CIRCULATIONS
237
so she may be referring to these years.2 Angela V. John, Rhondda’s most recent biographer,
suggests that ‘Circulation rose steadily during the first three years’.3 The Advertiser’s ABC records,
in 1923 and 1924, a circulation of 4,000 copies weekly for a fourpenny magazine named Time
and Tide Table.4 The price and periodicity are correct, and I can find no other record of this
magazine, so I have attributed these figures to Time and Tide.
The Nation and Athenaeum
Detailed financial data for the Nation and Athenaeum is preserved in Keynes’s archive in
Cambridge. Circulation figures are largely recorded in monthly reports; to obtain annual
figures, I have taken the mean. It is unclear whether these figures—which are substantially
lower than those provided to the ABC—include subscriptions. I have chosen not to add to these
figures, but it is recorded that across 1928 and 1929 there were around 1,500 subscribers to the
Nation and Athenaeum.5
The Spectator
I have not been able to access archival material for the Spectator, and do not know if historical
circulation data has been preserved; figures are taken from the ABC.
The Listener
Detailed figures for the Listener are found in the BBC Written Archives Centre; the numbers
given below are taken from a 1953 report on the state of the Listener.
2 Shirley M. Eoff, Viscountess Rhondda: Equalitarian Feminist (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1991), pp. 121,
168 n. 14. Eoff locates these reports in the Rebecca West papers at the University of Tulsa.
3 Angela V. John, Turning the Tide: The Life of Lady Rhondda (Cardigan: Parthian, 2013), p. 298.
4 T. B. Browne Ltd, The Advertiser's ABC, 45 vols (London: T. B. Browne, 1887-1931), XXXVII-XXXVIII (1923-
24).
5 Cambridge, King's College Special Collections (KCSC), J. M. Keynes Papers, King's/PP/JMK/NS/4/2/110.
CIRCULATIONS
238
The New Statesman
The New Statesman archives from this period have not survived. Figures are taken from the ABC,
and in the thirties from numbers provided in the paper as subscriptions rose. There is no
indication that these later figures were audited, but there is also no reason not to include them.
In his biography of Kingsley Martin, C. H. Rolph suggests that the New Statesman had a
circulation of 14,000 when Martin took over in 1931. He places the circulation at the end of the
1930s at 30,000 copies.6
6 C. H. Rolph, Kingsley: The Life, Letters and Diaries of Kingsley Martin (London: Gollancz, 1973), p. 221.
CIRCULATIONS
239
Table 2: Amalgamated Circulation Figures
Time and Tide
Nation and Athenaeum
Spectator
Listener
New Statesman
1920
1921
1922
11,571a
7747b
11,571a
7008b
11,500a
6521b
11,562a
6147b
11,500a
6137b
11,500a
6139b
1931
22,360a37,586c
1932
38,087c
1933
42,627c
1934
50,670c
1935
52,379c20,833d
1936
50,626c24,221e
1937
48,180c
22,360a
33,803c
27,772c
21,734a
21,734a
21,293a
21,293a
19,166a
6567b
6752b
1930
1923
1924
1925
1926
1927
4000a
10,000a
10,000a
4000a
8000a
1928
1929
CIRCULATIONS
240
Sources
a T. B. Browne Ltd, The Advertiser’s ABC, 45 vols (London: T. B. Browne, 1887-1931)
b Cambridge, King's College Special Collections (KCSC), J. M. Keynes Papers,
King's/PP/JMK/NS/3, 4.
c Caversham, BBC Written Archives Centre (WAC), Publications: Listener Articles: Policy,
R43/85/2 (‘The Listener’, G.97/53)
d Average weekly sales July-December 1935. ‘Our Net Sales’, The New Statesman and Nation,
1 February 1936, p. 152.
e Average weekly sales July-December 1936. ‘Our Net Sales’, The New Statesman and Nation,
16 January 1937, p. 84.
241
APPENDIX C: FRONT PAGES
Weekly reviews were uniform and sober in appearance. As evidence of this, as well as to give a
visual impression of these periodicals, I reprint the front pages of each of the magazines under
study. The front pages are all taken from the week immediately following the crash in Wall
Street. Note that the Listener, which lacks the political and economic focus on the week’s news of
the other magazines, does not cover the crash.
FRONT PAGES
242
FRONT PAGES
243
FRONT PAGES
244
Cover The Spectator; Nov 2, 1929; 143, 5288; ProQuest pg. 611
FRONT PAGES
245
FRONT PAGES
246
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Archival
Brighton, University of Sussex, Leonard Woolf Papers, SxMs-13
——, University of Sussex, Monks House Papers, SxMs-18
Cambridge, King's College Special Collections, J. M. Keynes Papers, King's/PP/JMK
Caversham, BBC Written Archives Centre, Publications: Listener Articles: Policy, R43/85
——, BBC Written Archives Centre, Publications: The Listener, R43/60
——, BBC Written Archives Centre, Special Collections: Pearce, S210
Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, Janet Adam Smith Papers, Acc. 12342
London, British Library, Wrench Papers, Add MS 59541-97
Weekly Reviews
‘Amicus’, ‘John St Loe Strachey’, The Spectator, 3 September 1927, Special Supplement, p. ii
Andreae, Alex R., ‘A Banned Writer [Letter]’, The New Statesman and Nation, 5 March 1932, p.
292
‘[‘Appassionata’. By Fanny Hurst]’, The Spectator, 17 April 1926, p. 730
Auden, W. H., ‘Noah's Song [adapted from Ernst Toller]’, The New Statesman and Nation, 13 June
1936, p. 931
——, ‘Poem’, The New Statesman and Nation, 16 July 1932, p. 69
——, ‘Poem’, The New Statesman and Nation, 14 March 1936, Spring Announcements
Supplement, p. 392
——, ‘Song’, The New Statesman and Nation, 16 January 1937, p. 81
Ball, Arthur, ‘The Spirit's Arming’, The Listener, 12 July 1933, Nine Poems: Poetry Supplement,
p. iv
Bartlett, Robert, ‘An Advertisement for Polythymol Toothpaste in the Manner of T. S. Eliot’,
The New Statesman and Nation, 5 June 1937, p. 940
Bell, Clive, ‘T. S. Eliot’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 22 September 1923, pp. 772-73
——, ‘We Are Amused’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 16 July 1927, p. 519
Bell, Julian [as ‘J. H. B.’], ‘Stewed Poetry’, The New Statesman and Nation, 17 February 1934, p.
242
Bennett, Arnold, ‘Is the Novel Decaying?’, Cassell's Weekly, 28 March 1923, p. 47
Benson, E. F., ‘A Notable First Novel’, The Spectator, 10 September 1927, pp. 392-95
Beresford, J. D., ‘The Successors of Charles Dickens’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 29 December
1923, pp. 487-88
Bullett, Gerald, ‘Virginia Woolf Soliloquises’, The New Statesman and Nation, 10 October 1931,
Autumn Books Supplement, p. x
Carr, E. H., ‘The Age of Unreason’, The Spectator, 26 April 1930, p. 698
‘The Censorship of the Mind’, The Spectator, 1 September 1928, pp. 258-59
Church, Richard, ‘The Anchorite's Lament’, The Listener, 11 February 1931, p. 244
——, ‘D. H. Lawrence: The Artist’, The Spectator, 19 April 1930, pp. 670-71
——, ‘Latterday Eurydice’, The Listener, 24 February 1932, p. 280
Clarke, Austin, ‘Interpretations and Intuitions’, The Spectator, 4 December 1926, Literary
Supplement, p. 1026
——, ‘Unconstitutional Poetry’, The Spectator, 9 March 1929, Literary Supplement, p. 377
Connolly, Cyril, ‘New Novels’, The New Statesman and Nation, 3 August 1935, pp. 166-67
‘Current Literature’, The Spectator, 24 December 1927, p. 1132
Dane, Clemence, ‘“Two-Eyes”’, Time and Tide, 21 May 1920, pp. 32-34
BIBLIOGRAPHY
248
Day Lewis, C., ‘Demigods and Heroes’, The Listener, 12 July 1933, Nine Poems: Poetry
Supplement, p. i
Day Lewis, Cecil, ‘Address to Death’, The New Statesman and Nation, 1 May 1937, Literary
Supplement, p. 721
——, ‘Sonnet’, The New Statesman and Nation, 26 May 1934, p. 798
——, ‘You That Love England’, The New Statesman and Nation, 3 December 1932, p. 690
‘[Editorial Note]’, The Listener, 11 February 1931, p. 244
Eliot, T. S., ‘Andrew Marvell’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 29 September 1923, p. 809
——, ‘The Beating of a Drum’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 6 October 1923, pp. 11-12
——, ‘Cheese [letter]’, The New Statesman and Nation, 21 December 1935, p. 977
——, ‘John Donne’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 9 June 1923, pp. 331-32
‘A Female Shakespeare?’, The Spectator, 28 December 1929, p. 985
Fry, Roger, ‘Degas’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 28 July 1923, pp. 549-50
Garnett, David, ‘Books in General’, The New Statesman and Nation, 4 August 1934, p. 154
——, ‘Books in General’, The New Statesman and Nation, 20 March 1937, p. 481
Goldman, Arnold, ‘“Send Him Canorious”—Arnold Goldman writes about James Joyce's
“Sullivanising”’, The Listener, 3 August 1972, pp. 142-44
Gould, Gerald, ‘Real Life’, Time and Tide, 2 December 1921, p. 1158
Grant, Duncan, ‘Virginia Woolf’, Horizon, June 1941, pp. 402-06
Graves, Robert, ‘The Eagle and the Wren’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 26 May 1923, pp. 272-73
Hamilton, Mary Agnes, ‘Seeing Straight’, Time and Tide, 7 July 1922, pp. 641-42
Hawkins, A. Desmond, ‘Mr Eliot’, The New Statesman and Nation, 5 October 1935, pp. 460-62
Hewitt, John, ‘Anti-Promethean Ode’, The Listener, 12 July 1933, Nine Poems: Poetry
Supplement, p. i
Hughes, Richard, ‘Mutations of the Phoenix’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 23 June 1923, pp. 399-
400
‘[In the House of Commons on Tuesday...]’, The Spectator, 23 June 1917, p. 690
‘[It is now three years since...]’, Time and Tide, 28 October 1927, p. 955
‘James Joyce’, The Spectator, 22 November 1930, p. 801
Joad, C. E. M., ‘The End of an Epoch—I’, The New Statesman and Nation, 1 December 1934, pp.
785-86
——, ‘The End of an Epoch—II’, The New Statesman and Nation, 8 December 1934, pp. 820-21
Jones, E. B. C., ‘New Novels’, The New Statesman and Nation, 28 October 1933, p. 518
Joyce, James, ‘From a Banned Writer To a Banned Singer’, The New Statesman and Nation, 27
February 1932, pp. 260-61
‘[Last Week at Leamington...]’, Time and Tide, 14 May 1920, p. 1
Lawrence, T. E. [as ‘C. D.’], ‘A Critic of Critics Criticized’, The Spectator, 27 August 1927, pp.
321-22
—— [as ‘C. D.’], ‘D. H. Lawrence's Novels’, The Spectator, 6 August 1927, p. 223
—— [as ‘C. D.’], ‘Hakluyt—First Naval Propagandist’, The Spectator, 10 September 1927, pp.
390-91
—— [as ‘C. D.’], ‘Mixed Biscuits’, The Spectator, 20 August 1927, pp. 290-91
—— [as ‘C. D.’], ‘The Wells Short Stories’, The Spectator, 25 February 1928, pp. 268-69
Leavis, F. R. [unsigned], ‘The Listener's Book Chronicle: New Country. Edited by Michael
Roberts’, The Listener, 12 April 1933, pp. 602-03
—— [unsigned], ‘The Listener's Book Chronicle: The Orators. By W. H. Auden. Tomorrow
Will Be Different. By Daniel George’, The Listener, 22 June 1932, p. 906
——, ‘The Living Lawrence’, The Listener, 5 October 1932, Literary Supplement, pp. iv-vii
Lehmann, John, ‘As the Day Burns On’, The Listener, 12 July 1933, Nine Poems: Poetry
Supplement, p. iv
‘The Listener's Book Chronicle: Mercury Verse’, The Listener, 15 July 1931, p. 113
‘The Listener's Book Chronicle: New English Poems’, The Listener, 13 January 1932, p. 64
BIBLIOGRAPHY
249
‘The Listener's Book Chronicle: News From the Mountain. By Richard Church’, The Listener,
21 September 1932, pp. 426-27
Lynd, Sylvia, ‘Authors at Play’, Time and Tide, 18 January 1924, pp. 56-57
——, ‘A Great Novel At Last’, Time and Tide, 20 June 1924, pp. 592-93
——, ‘Greater and Lesser Magnitudes’, Time and Tide, 9 November 1923, pp. 1124-25
——, ‘Indiscretion and Laughter’, Time and Tide, 29 October 1926, pp. 983-84
——, ‘New Novels’, Time and Tide, 24 November 1922, pp. 1136-37
——, ‘Three Popular Authors’, Time and Tide, 5 February 1926, pp. 127-28
——, ‘Town and Country’, Time and Tide, 15 May 1925, p. 472
Macaulay, Rose, ‘Book Reviews’, Time and Tide, 1 July 1921, pp. 628-29
MacCarthy, Molly [as ‘M. M.’], ‘A Nineteenth-Century Childhood: I’, The Nation and Athenaeum,
1 September 1923, pp. 683-84
‘Machines to Think With’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 7 August 1926, pp. 532-33
MacNamara, Margaret, ‘A New Idea’, Time and Tide, 14 May 1920, pp. 17-21
Madge, Charles, ‘Birdseye’, The Listener, 12 July 1933, Nine Poems: Poetry Supplement, p. iv
Mortimer, Raymond, ‘New Novels’, The New Statesman and Nation, 22 April 1933, p. 507
——, ‘Significant Form’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 28 February 1925, pp. 750-51
Moult, Thomas, ‘Poetry for Quiet People’, Time and Tide, 20 June 1924, pp. 593-94
——, ‘Poetry: Emily Dickinson to May Sinclair’, Time and Tide, 7 November 1924, p. 1091
‘Mr James Joyce’, The Spectator, 3 August 1929, pp. 162-63
Muir, Edwin, ‘Contemporary Writers: I—Lytton Strachey’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 25 April
1925, pp. 102-04
——, ‘Contemporary Writers: II—Mr D. H. Lawrence’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 4 July 1925,
pp. 425-27
——, ‘Contemporary Writers: III—Mr T. S. Eliot’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 29 August 1925,
pp. 644-46
——, ‘Contemporary Writers: IV—Aldous Huxley’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 27 February
1926, pp. 743-44
——, ‘Contemporary Writers: V—Virginia Woolf’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 17 April 1926, pp.
70-72
——, ‘Contemporary Writers: VI—Mr Robert Graves’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 14 August
1926, pp. 554-55
——, ‘Contemporary Writers: VII—Edith Sitwell’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 18 September
1926, pp. 698-700
——, ‘Fiction’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 2 July 1927, pp. 450-52
——, ‘Past and Present’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 18 October 1924, pp. 116-18
‘The News of the Week’, The Spectator, 5 July 1828, p. 1
Nicolson, Harold, ‘The New Spirit in Literature—VI: Intellect and Instinct’, The Listener, 11
November 1931, pp. 823-24
‘Nine Poems [Poetry Supplement]’, The Listener, 12 July 1933, pp. i-iv
‘Our Net Sales’, The New Statesman and Nation, 1 February 1936, p. 152
‘Our Net Sales’, The New Statesman and Nation, 16 January 1937, p. 84
‘Personalities and Powers: William Butler Yeats’, Time and Tide, 8 August 1924, pp. 762-64
‘Poetry’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 5 June 1926, p. 252
Priestley, J. B., ‘The Novelist's Art’, The Spectator, 5 December 1925, p. 1047
‘A Programme’, Time and Tide, 21 January 1921, p. 52
Quennell, Peter, ‘Mr T. S. Eliot’, The New Statesman and Nation, 18 April 1936, pp. 603-04
——, ‘New Novels’, The New Statesman and Nation, 17 October 1936, pp. 592-93
——, ‘T. S. Eliot the Critic’, The New Statesman and Nation, 1 October 1932, pp. 377-78
Read, Herbert, ‘Logos’, The Listener, 12 July 1933, Nine Poems: Poetry Supplement, p. i
——, ‘Time and Mr Wyndham Lewis’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 19 November 1927, pp. 282-
24
BIBLIOGRAPHY
250
Roberts, Michael [unsigned], ‘The Listener's Book Chronicle: Poems. By Stephen Spender’,
The Listener, 1 February 1933, p. 190
Royde-Smith, Naomi, ‘Yarns’, Time and Tide, 27 November 1925, pp. 1164-65
Sackville-West, Vita, ‘Anthologies and Poets’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 24 January 1925, p. 585
Sadleir, Michael, ‘Why Only Dickens?’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 9 February 1924, pp. 667-68
Sitwell, Edith, ‘A New Poet’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 8 January 1927, pp. 514-15
Smith, Janet Adam [unsigned], ‘“Modernist” Poetry’, The Listener, 12 July 1933, p. 50
——, ‘T. S. Eliot and “The Listener”’, The Listener, 21 January 1965, p. 105
Smith, Logan Pearsall, ‘First Catch Your Hare’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 2 February 1924, pp.
629-30
‘Special Offer for Subscribers [advertisement]’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 1 September 1923, p.
693
‘“The Spectator”’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 3 November 1928, pp. 168-69
Spencer, Bernard, ‘How Must We Live?’, The Listener, 12 July 1933, Nine Poems: Poetry
Supplement, p. i
Spender, Stephen, ‘The Bird’, The New Statesman and Nation, 27 May 1933, p. 684
——, ‘Perhaps’, The New Statesman and Nation, 4 November 1933, p. 549
——, ‘The Problems of Poet and Public’, The Spectator, 3 August 1929, pp. 152-53
——, ‘Regum Ultima Ratio’, The New Statesman and Nation, 15 May 1937, p. 811
——, ‘The Town Shore at Barcelona’, The New Statesman and Nation, 11 April 1936, p. 566
——, ‘Two Armies’, The New Statesman and Nation, 8 May 1937, p. 770
——, ‘The Use of Poetry’, The New Statesman and Nation, 18 November 1933, pp. 637-38
——, ‘War Photograph’, The New Statesman and Nation, 5 June 1937, p. 922
Stonier, G. W., ‘The Author of “Ulysses”’, The New Statesman and Nation, 3 February 1934, p.
158
——, ‘Crazy Week’, The New Statesman and Nation, 3 December 1932, pp. 698-700
——, ‘New Country Revisited’, The New Statesman and Nation, 27 October 1934, pp. 588-89
——, ‘A Poet of Iron’, The New Statesman and Nation, 4 February 1933, p. 136
——, ‘The Private Face’, The New Statesman and Nation, 28 May 1932, pp. 710-11
——, ‘Results of Competition 375’, The New Statesman and Nation, 5 June 1937, pp. 938-40
——, ‘Week-end Competitions No. 375’, The New Statesman and Nation, 22 May 1937, pp. 860-
62
Strachey, Lytton, ‘Sarah Bernhardt’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 5 May 1923, pp. 152-53
Taylor, Rachel Annand, ‘Fiction: Virginia Woolf and Others’, The Spectator, 14 May 1927, p.
871
‘This Week's Books’, The Spectator, 28 March 1925, pp. 503-04
‘This Week’s Books’, The Spectator, 28 November 1925, p. 987
Thomas, Margaret Haig and Rebecca West, ‘The Function of the Weekly Review’, Time and
Tide, 9 December 1927, pp. 1114-15
‘Time and Tide’, Time and Tide, 14 May 1920, p. 4
Townsend, C., ‘The Story of the “Spectator”’, The Spectator, 3 November 1928, pp. 1-8
Underhill, Evelyn [as ‘E. U.’], ‘Mr Eliot's Essays’, The Spectator, 9 February 1929, pp. 206-09
Waugh, Alec, ‘You May Lead a Horse to the Water’, Time and Tide, 20 August 1920, pp. 307-
09
West, Rebecca, ‘“The Freewoman”’, Time and Tide, 16 July 1926, pp. 648-49
——, ‘The Theatre: “Mary Rose”’, Time and Tide, 14 May 1920, pp. 10-11
White, T. H., ‘A Dray Horse’, The Listener, 12 July 1933, Nine Poems: Poetry Supplement, p. iv
Williams-Ellis, Amabel, ‘Books of the Moment: Seven Books of Essays’, The Spectator, 10 January
1925, p. 47
Woolf, Leonard, ‘Thomas Hardy’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 21 January 1928, pp. 597-98
——, ‘The World of Books: Arch Beyond Arch’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 14 June 1924, p. 354
——, ‘The World of Books: Modern Poetry’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 18 April 1925, p. 76
BIBLIOGRAPHY
251
——, ‘The World of Books: Mr Roger Fry’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 27 November 1926, p.
304
——, ‘The World of Books: The Bolshies on Parnassus’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 14 December
1929, p. 402
——, ‘The World of Books: The Lost Flute’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 10 November 1923, p.
222
——, ‘The World of Books: The Novel of To-Day’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 3 December 1927,
p. 356
——, ‘The World of Books: The Revolt Against Europe’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 20 August
1927, p. 666
Woolf, Virginia, ‘All About Books’, The New Statesman and Nation, 28 February 1931, pp. 14-15
——, ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 1 December 1923, pp. 342-43
——, ‘Romance and the Heart’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 19 May 1923, Literary Supplement,
p. 229
——, ‘To Spain’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 5 May 1923, pp. 153-55
Yeats-Brown, Francis, ‘Signor Mussolini: The New Italy Incarnate’, The Spectator, 9 October
1926, pp. 562-63
General
Abu-Manneh, Bashir, Fiction of the ‘New Statesman’, 1913-1939 (Newark: University of Delaware
Press, 2011)
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Ardis, Ann, ‘The Dialogics of Modernism(s) in the New Age’, Modernism/modernity, 14 (2007), 407-
34
Ardis, Ann and Patrick Collier, eds, Transatlantic Print Culture, 1880-1940: Emerging Media,
Emerging Modernisms (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008)
Arnold, John and Ray Randall, Work Psychology: Understanding Human Behaviour in the Workplace,
5th edn (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2010)
Auden, W. H., The Complete Works of W. H. Auden, ed. by Edward Mendelson, 6 vols to date
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993- )
——, The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings 1927-1939, ed. by Edward
Mendelson (London: Faber and Faber, 1986)
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2006)
Bakhtin, Mikhail M., The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. by Michael Holquist, trans. by
Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981)
Baldick, Chris, The Oxford English Literary History: Volume 10, 1910-1940: The Modern Movement
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)
Bandish, Cynthia L., ‘Bakhtin's Dialogism and the Bohemian Meta-Narrative of “Belgravia”: A
Case Study for Analyzing Periodicals’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 34 (2001), 239-62
Beales, Derek, ‘The Electorate Before and After 1832: the Right to Vote, and the Opportunity’,
Parliamentary History, 11 (1992), 139-50
Beetham, Margaret, ‘Towards a Theory of the Periodical as a Publishing Genre’, in Investigating
Victorian Journalism, ed. by Laurel Brake, Aled Jones and Lionel Madden (Houndmills:
Macmillan, 1990), pp. 19-32
Bell, Michael, ‘Lawrence and Modernism’, in The Cambridge Companion to D. H. Lawrence, ed. by
Anne Fernihough (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 179-96
Bell, Quentin, Virginia Woolf: a Biography, 2 vols (London: Hogarth Press, 1972)
Binckes, Faith, Modernism, Magazines, and the British Avant-Garde (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2010)
BIBLIOGRAPHY
252
Bingham, Adrian, ‘“An Era of Domesticity”? Histories of Women and Gender in Interwar
Britain’, Cultural and Social History, 1 (2004), 225-33
Bloom, Harold, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (London: Macmillan, 1995)
Bluemel, Kristin, George Orwell and the Radical Eccentrics: Intermodernism in Literary London
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004)
——, ed., Intermodernism: Literary Culture in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
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Brake, Laurel and Anne Humpherys, ‘Critical Theory and Periodical Research’, Victorian
Periodicals Review, 22 (1989), 94-95
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Brooker, Joseph, Joyce's Critics: Transitions in Reading and Culture (Madison: University of
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Brooker, Peter, Sascha Bru, Andrew Thacker and Christian Weikop, eds, The Oxford Critical and
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Brooker, Peter and Andrew Thacker, ‘General Introduction’, in The Oxford Critical and Cultural
History of Modernist Magazines: Volume I, Britain and Ireland 1880-1955, ed. by Peter Brooker
and Andrew Thacker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 1-26
Bürger, Peter, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. by Michael Shaw (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1984)
Calinescu, Matei, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1987)
Cardiff, David and Paddy Scannell, A Social History of British Broadcasting: Volume One 1922-1939,
Serving the Nation (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991)
Carey, John, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia
(London: Faber and Faber, 1992)
Cecil, Hugh, Conservatism (London: Williams and Norgate, 1912)
Charmley, John, A History of Conservative Politics Since 1830, 2nd edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2008)
Chinitz, David, T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003)
Church, Richard, News from the Mountain (Letchworth: The Temple Press, 1932)
Churchill, Suzanne W., The Little Magazine ‘Others’ and the Renovation of Modern American Poetry
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006)
Churchill, Suzanne W. and Adam McKible, eds, Little Magazines & Modernism: New Approaches
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007)
Clay, Catherine, British Women Writers, 1914-1945: Professional Work and Friendship (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2006)
——, ‘On Not Forgetting “The Importance of Everything Else”: Feminism, Modernism and
Time and Tide (1920-1939)’, Key Words, 8 (2009), 22-37
——, ‘“WHAT WE MIGHT EXPECT - If the Highbrow Weeklies Advertized like the Patent
Foods”: Time and Tide, Advertising, and the “Battle of the Brows”’, Modernist Cultures, 6
(2011), 60-95
BIBLIOGRAPHY
253
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